One of the great things about competition in a capitalist economy is advancement. Someone develops and produces a product, shortly there after someone else creates a slightly better version. This goes on and on until we end up with movies directed by Michael Bay. In an example of this, Barnes & Noble released the Nook today. Everybody who preordered the new Nook eReader emailed me today and they both have mixed feelings about the Nook.
B&N played it smart by aiming for the same hetro audiences that plunk down cash to see a Michael Bay movie by making the Nook more badass, social, and compatible. They drastically cranked up the “eBook badass dial” to eleven. The Nook has a secondary screen that allows users to scroll through book covers ala iTunes. Sure, the Kindle has a keyboard, but that is only for people who like functionality. As everyone knows, the target audience for badass things like Michael Bay movies reads voraciously, so B&N will make a killing.
The Nook has taken new steps twaords making the eReader experience more social. Those with kindles know that reading in public leads to spending almost as much time talking about the Kindle as reading it. Amazon just doesn’t do brick and mortar, but since the money is in the content, basing a store on selling the Kindle hardware and limited accessories is about as smart as putting a battery-draining LCD on an eReader so that users can squint and barely distinguish titles with similar covers. The Nook, however, has a book sharing feature that lets users loan out books to others. This feature is not only cool, but rather necessary. Because the initial launch of the Nook has a rather long load time for books, this gives users the ability to discuss which books another might wish to borrow.
Quite unlike the Kindle, the Nook supports the more common eBook formats, such as ePub, in exchange for the proprietary formats than Amazon’s Kindle forces users to adapt to, such as TXT.
One area that Amazon has decided is a priority to gain an edge in the competition is full support for the seeing impaired. No longer will the blind be forced to wander through the Kindle’s muted interface. In the not too distant future (looks like summer), the Kindle with receive an option to navigate through its menus audibly. Jumping on this bandwagon of making products accessible to the visually impaired are Ford and Colt Firearms. Looks like next rear will be great year to read at home, away from streets, and blind people driving cars.
