Harry McCracken reviews Barnes & Noble’s Nook.
The Nook has one feature that really had me excited: the ability to share books. So when I read this statement, I was disappointed:
“Even the much-hyped lending feature has a major gotcha: You can lend a book once. Period.”
That’s a shame. The one place that B&N really could have blown Amazon out of the water, they’ve squandered their chance. Kindle users have been asking for this feature since the device’s release two years ago. I have to think that Amazon is hard at work in the lab designing a book sharing mechanism for Kindle.
That said, the Nook’s build quality and format openness are both attractive features that should give Amazon some stiff competition. And like McCracken mentions in the review, B&N has the massive brick-and-mortar store backing that Amazon lacks to tout their product to a wider market.
The one big downside I’ve seen with all e-readers (though I’ve not used one personally, besides an old Sony Reader) is the lack of touchscreen. The Nook and Sony devices both have touch, but not substantially useful touch. On the Nook only the bottom mini-color screen has touch functionality, and the Sony device has a full touchscreen, but must be used with a stylus. At this point I feel like the iPhone Kindle app is still the best e-reading experience for me. And it’s free, once you have the phone.
One cool feature Nook that Amazon and Sony truly can’t compete with:
“When you take the e-reader into a B&N branch, it notices you’re there, connects you to the store’s hotspot for free, and greets you–and may offer you fringe benefits such as free content or a complimentary cookie at the store’s coffee counter. Barnes & Noble also plans to let Nook owners hanging out at the company’s stores peruse books in their entirety, not just the brief samples that can otherwise be downloaded for free. (This feature isn’t quite ready yet, so I wasn’t able to test it.)”
Kindle for iPhone 1.2 now supports inline notes and highlighting. Both sync across devices with WhisperSync.
This is easily my most-used app now. I’ve read three full-length books on my iPhone in the last couple months, lovin’ it.
A Game of Thrones
I purchased a copy of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones sometime back in college, upon recommendation from my dad, who had recently devoured the whole series. It sat there on my shelf for the previous 5 or 6 years, and a number of times I’d picked it up, read the first 20-30 pages, and put it down. Maybe I wasn’t ready for a big fantasy series, but mostly I just hadn’t given it a chance. I started it in early September and finished it in a couple weeks.
On it’s surface, the whole Song of Ice and Fire series looks like run-of-the-mill, Tolkien-rip-off high fantasy. The prologue to Book One really fortifies that impression, too. But once I’d reached chapter 10 or 11, it became clear that Martin was really putting an interesting and original twist on this worn-out genre.
Character development is what makes this series work so well, and causes it to be as addictive as it is. Each chapter is told from the point-of-view of one of the main characters, of which there are many. Until you get to the point in the story where you’re revisiting characters for a second or third time, it’s difficult to see how the plot threads are twisting together. Like other epics, the “family trees” and the geography of the world plays an integral part in your understanding of the events, and that knowledge just takes pages and pages to acquire.
The Lord of the Rings is such a fascinating book — to me — for reasons largely peripheral to the story. The geography and cultures of Middle-earth, and depth of mythology, were the elements that had me reading the deeper histories written by Tolkien. The plot of the “War of the Ring” always seemed like an excuse to showcase this wildly intricate set of languages and mythologies created by the author. With Thrones, for about the first half of the book, I didn’t get the vibe that Martin cared too much about the history of his world. His writing is definitely simpler than Tolkien’s, but Martin does hang a lot of backstory and cultural qualities on the plot over time, it’s just that those elements are not front-and-center. Martin’s concentration is on the family relationships, conspiracies, and intrigue of dozens of characters.
In the last couple weeks I’m about 3/4ths of the way through Book Two, A Clash of Kings. Much darker and more depressing than Thrones, but it’s continuing everything that I love about the series.
GoodReads interviews Chris Anderson about his new book, Free. It is, appropriately, free in electronic form (the link above) for two weeks before and after its release.
Interview with Clark Johnson. Johnson plays Augustus Haynes, city desk editor of the Baltimore Sun, on season 5 of The Wire.
He starred in Homicide: Life on the Street, as well as The Wire. I’m interested in watching some Homicide… I’m almost finished with David Simon’s book upon which the series was based, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.
The AV Club has an interesting feature up right now on Anthony Bourdain, host of No Reservations on the Travel Channel.
Last year I read his book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, in which he fully exposes the realities of the restaurant business. His philosophy is fascinating, and his personality makes for great writing and television.
I’ve been using this book some… pretty good, especially for free.
