Nook vs Kobo

8 comments on “Nook vs Kobo”

1. Monica says:
   June 21st, 2010 at 1:42 pm

   I actually bought a real live Nook, when i was in New York City in April. I was assured by the store staff that i’d be able to purchase books for it, even tho i lived in Canada. I soon realized that this was not the case, and returned it. That’s my story about my excursion on the dark side. It was nice… and the guy who sold it to me said that there was talk about B&N selling the actual book, with an e-copy for your reader, so you could have a lovely shelf of books with the convenience of having the whole shelf in your purse(or manpurse.. murse) Of course, he could have been lying about that too. I like the Nook’s wireless feature, and the touch screen on the bottom, and how easy it was to use. I miss it, still, tho i wasn’t able to use it. At all. I named it Alice.

2. Degen says:
   June 21st, 2010 at 2:27 pm

   Gah, your security device stole a long comment.

   So, here’s the summary:

   Why e-browse in store, when you are in a very large room full of real books? The feature sounds good, but who would use it? There are better places to read than leaning against the shelves at B&N.

   The touchscreen and annotation features also don’t work for me. I want an e-reader that seem booky, not computery. That’s the Kobo — low-tech, light, no e-mail or 3G distractions. I read books I wouldn’t buy on the Kobo, make my notes with a pen and moleskine, and still buy the physical books I want as objects.

   Also, George, you’re so curmudgeonly with the “rent my books” comment. Why, back in my day…

   I live in a small condo. I need to make smart choices about space saving. That used to mean a lot of trips to the library. For now, increasingly, it means Kobo.

3. George says:
   June 21st, 2010 at 5:55 pm

   As usual, John serves society best as a cautionary example. Since I first installed the captcha it’s been the same: if you take an extended time to compose in-field on the web, you’ll get burned and lose your comment. If you need write a novel for your response, either do it in a text editor and copy/paste over, or copy your text before you hit submit… Otherwise the captcha times out and you lose your post.

4. Bourgeois Nerd says:
   June 21st, 2010 at 7:28 pm

   I just can’t wait until they stop giving stupid names to these devices. I mean, really? “Kobo”? “Nook”? Even “Kindle”?

5. Heather says:
   June 21st, 2010 at 9:25 pm

   I’m telling you, man…ebooks are not that bad, and you can own the books (or you can be a communist and borrow them from the People’s Socialist Republic of Das Librarystolz). Just like the old-fashioned analog books.

6. Degen says:
   June 22nd, 2010 at 10:06 am

   Yep, on Kobo I am just finishing up The Last Stand, a non-fiction about Gen. Custer, Sitting Bull and that whole business there in Montana (I travelled in Montana last summer). This is a book I probably would not ever buy in paper. So for about $20 less, I have it as an e-book, and am happy to own it that way. I predict the various e-bookers will get a standard all figured out, and pricing will level off, and then the big fight will simply be branding, like with any other product.

   That Custer… not the nicest person in North American history, let me tell you.

7. Pam says:
   June 22nd, 2010 at 2:59 pm

   I own a Jet Book Lite; uses AA batteries and cost me $115 at NewEgg. Nice to be able to bring lots of books when on the go. Downsides to e-books in general are so many of them are tacky. Paper versions have to look nice, or at least someone’s definition of sale-able. Pagination can be a pain, as some formats when presented as a full page are too small to be readable; enlarge the font, and one must scroll down the remainder of the page before going to the next partial page. Titles on a download might be nothing more than the storage number. Many of the readers only permit certain formats; my JBL does not ‘do’ Adobe DRM formats, either of them, and many books only come in Adobe DRM. Many books do not come in e-book form. And if you are doing something with photos or charts, forget it; a large hardback will never be replaced, IMHO. But for scurvy fiction titles, especially those that one may not want to be seen carrying around a store, well, it works. And perhaps for me, the biggest benefit besides not needing to store/handle/pack around large numbers of books (I spend many thousands on reading materials every year) is that my reader sits in my hand, I turn the page with one thumb. No sticking pages, no hand cramps from holding the book open, no pages printed too close to the center fold to make reading a pain.

8. Mike says:
   September 11th, 2010 at 8:50 am

   The JetBook Lite has a firmware update (v0.16e) that now allows you to read the pub with Adobe DRM protection. It also now accepts the B&N ebook pub format. This now makes it possible to read books from the library, which is why I bought it.

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