Last week I was pretty much 50-50 on whether or not I should get another device, in this particular case, a Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch e-ink Reader. I was hemming and hawing because I already enjoy my iPad so much, I didn’t know if the Nook would be just something to have to have it versus something I’d really use. Thanks to Scott, I got a chance to sit down and really look at a Nook before I had to buy one for myself. Even the test period didn’t really help much, it did shift me 60-40, in favor of the Nook, but I was still quite firmly sitting on that fence.

Later on that week I decided that I was going to get the Nook after all, and to hop off the fence. I did post a question to my blog and social networking groups, but only one or two people commented so that avenue wasn’t as useful as I had hoped. Thanks a a lot people! 😉 So I went to Scott’s store and Scott and I went through the dance, I asked to buy, he gave me his corporate-mandated pitch, and because I’m cheeky, I decided to add a B&N Membership to the entire thing, which did get me $10 off the Nook. Truth to be told, getting the membership (a renewal after it lapsed so long ago) was partly to boost Scott’s membership-card levels and partly for a treat that B&N now has in their cafe, a Key Lime Tart that is probably very bad for me, but tastes oh-so-good. Now I can get a discount on my guilty pleasure and from time to time get a Starbucks drink from people who I trust and who I know LISTEN. So, I got my Nook and we hit the road, heading somewhere in Scott’s new Juke. I sat there pawing at the new device and wanting to set it up. I wondered just how much of a charge might be on the device and if I could indeed set it up while in the car on a road trip. I turned the Personal Hotspot on my iPhone on and started my new Nook. It came with a 69% full battery. More than enough to get it up and running! So I had my Nook set up but no books on it. That came later. By the time I was really starting to explore the Nook we had reached our destination and it was time to put the gadget away.

The Nook is much like the iPad, in so far that Apple and Barnes & Noble both produce a semi-open/semi-locked device. Both devices can accept ePub file formatted e-Books. I copied all the ePub’s that I had over to my Nook and was very self-satisfied that none of them had a problem loading. The Nook doesn’t really have a way to get eBooks onto the device without buying them and pumping them through B&N’s infrastructure, but you can plug the device in and copy over your own ePub files, as many as you like. The Nook does have a little cheekiness to itself as it is. It’s billed as having a respectable storage amount, but you only get 250MB of user-accessible storage. This is kind of a gyp, but the Nook does provide a handy port for MicroSD on the side. After a while I noticed that my eBook collection would be bigger than the standard storage that came with the Nook itself and I (later on) got a 4GB MicroSD card from OfficeMax for just $17. Quite a deal. I set it all up and pushed my big library of ePub books over to the new Nook. It worked like a charm.

As I was browsing through Barnes & Noble’s store I saw a book that caught my eye. It was a Penguin Classic (those “classics” books with the plain covers and cheap prices) and it was Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. The book was very old, published in 1922. I scanned Project Gutenberg, which is a repository for public domain books and everything they have comes in ePub format. I found this book in PG, so I could skip buying it from B&N. No point in wasting money. I downloaded it on my laptop, copied it to my Nook, and I’ve been reading it as the first book on my Nook. I just finished it today and the experience was quite nice. Reading on the Nook is fast, the Nook ST is light as a feather and I really love it’s textured back. You can either tap/swipe the screen or use the dual edge button controls to advance the pages. The display is matte, it’s eInk, so it’s very easy on the eyes, and the fonts and sizes are of course configurable, which I really appreciate. The Nook doesn’t repaint the screen after each page, but only after 5 or 6 of them. This leaves little bits of eInk debris behind, but frankly I didn’t even notice it. The one thing I was bummed about was that I couldn’t find the dictionary feature on the test Nook. Turns out I didn’t read the manual, but once I accidentally tapped-and-held on a word I saw the way of it and that really worked for me. As I said, reading on the Nook is quite pleasurable and reading fast is easier than having to futz around with a physical book. It’s lighter than my iPad and doesn’t have the battery burn that the iPad does.

The Nook is not all rainbows and butterflies however. This past weekend I took my Nook to South Haven’s Beach for some light reading while everyone played around in Lake Michigan. In order to keep my device clean and safe I put it in a ziplock quart-size baggie. This worked well until I got out in to the bright sunshine. As the plastic would touch the screen the Nook would register it as an actual touch, since the Nooks system uses Infrared sensors to register touches on the display surface. I discovered I could avoid all of that by pulling the baggie tight against the Nook device, and that worked acceptably well. Beyond this little oddity, which really isn’t a problem, just something to watch out for and cope with, I am VERY HAPPY with my Nook Simple Touch. For the pricetag, only $139 bucks, you really can’t go wrong! The Nook does need some add-ons, but they aren’t too expensive. The little Nook light is nice to have, as well as that MicroSD card. Add it up and you still come up to about $150-160 bucks. Not bad for being able to haul around 1400 books in my pocket, on demand, able to read anytime and anyplace I like.

The only unanswered question is how will airlines consider the Nook? Even when it’s “Off” it displays an image. Do airlines regard the Nook as a device that needs to be turned off, or a book that doesn’t matter because you can’t turn it off? That’s something that I’ll have to find out once I fly again.