Please read pt. 1 here.
On Tuesday Barnes & Noble Booksellers announced their Nook 2, or “The Simple Touch Reader.”
The new Nook is much lighter than the original Nook, weighing in at just 7.5 oz. It’s even lighter than the Kindle 3. It sports an E-Ink Pearl display (probably my biggest jealousy point when it came to the Kindle 3); boasts 2 months of battery life (wi-fi turned off), which is reportedly twice as long as the Kindle 3; and has the coolest new feature among e-readers: a touchscreen E-Ink display.
No doubt Amazon will release an upgraded Kindle to compete with the new Nook, but for now I’ll just enjoy the fact that my e-reader of choice appears to be far superior to the Kindle 3.
Competition is already pretty hot, with Kobo releasing a new e-reader around the same time as the Nook. While Kobo’s e-reader isn’t as rich as the Nook 2, it does come in at $9 cheaper. Negligible price difference, but a difference nonetheless. Kobo’s battery life comes in at a paltry 2 weeks, shameful next to Kindle 3′s 4-week battery life and Nook 2′s 2-month life. Kobo also has the disadvantage of “ghosting,” an E-Ink anomaly that will be all but eliminated with Nook 2. These advantages are probably more than enough to justify the extra $9 for the Nook.
With this release, Barnes & Noble Booksellers is setting itself up to compete with some of the biggest names in their respective industries. This new Nook is aimed directly at Amazon’s Kindle, and it’s pretty obvious that the old bookshop is looking to dethrone the Internet shopping giant as the e-reader king. The Nook is already the second-best selling e-reader on the market.
Barnes & Noble also appears to be competing with Apple for a share of the tablet PC market. This market was opened by Apple’s iPad, and for a long time that was the only tablet on the market. Other companies eventually joined the fray, including Samsung, HTC, Motorola, RIM (Blackberry), Toshiba, HP, Acer, and Dell—all of them technology giants in their own right. But it was Barnes & Noble’s NookColor that took the top spot among them—second only to the iPad.
I’m excited to see what’s in store in the e-reader world. It’s only a matter of time before Amazon unveils the fourth iteration of the Kindle, but I’m probably going to go for the Nook since I’ve amassed a sizable library of NOOKbooks, and unfortunately NOOKbooks aren’t readable on a Kindle, and Amazon ebooks aren’t readable on anything other than a Kindle (or a hacked NookColor).
Check out CNET’s preview of the new Nook below.
