Dr. StrangeNook, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the eBook reader

First, I believe that I need to put a few things into context, for those who are reading this.  I consider myself a true bibliophile.  I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read, nor, to be honest, does most of my family.  If you ask, they’ll tell you that I emerged from the womb clutching a book in my hands.  I love reading, to the point that when I bumped into one of my former math teachers in an airport, he didn’t say hi to me until I pulled a book out of my backpack.  As soon as I started to read, he came over and said, “I thought that was you, but I didn’t know for sure until you pulled out that book.”

When I’m on breaks at work, I can usually be found reading.  One of my co-workers asked me not even a week ago if all I did in my spare time was read.  I explained that I write, sew, do art projects, and a whole host of other things, but I do read quite a bit.  Because I write, I keep a lot of my books, because everything is research.  I joke with my favorite used bookstore that my library is a bit like a roach motel:  books check in, but they don’t check back out.  At last count, I had nine bookshelves which are already full in a double layer and overflowing. 

Initially, I was resistant to the very idea of getting a Nook or Kindle.  I am enamored of the printed word.  As someone who does do some of her own bookbinding, I appreciate all of the designwork that goes into creating a book, from choosing typefaces to designing dustjackets, to selecting the colors of the bookcloth.  I love the delicious heft of a brand new hardback the day it’s released, coupled with the joy of knowing that you’re going to explore an entirely new story with your favorite author guiding the way.  It’s excitement and anticipation and happiness.  Then, there’s the thrill of hunting down older, out of print or rare editions of books, or even just going to a used bookstore and exploring what there is to find without worrying about any specific lists or goals.

I also keep a list, stored on my computer, of the books that I would still like to purchase.  Because I don’t yet have the means to build a custom hobbit hole with a gorgeous, climate-controlled library, nor have I discovered a way to create a pocket dimension, space is a concern for me.  The room for shelves is finite, unfortunately.

Once  I started to realize that I was rapidly running out of storage space, yet again, I started to weigh my options. I will always continue to purchase my favorite authors’ books in hardcover (when they’re available), and some of the things that I enjoy reading are a bit off the mainstream (which was a very diplomatic way of putting it from the same co-worker who asked if I read all the time) and just aren’t available in ebook format.  However, a good amount of things that I’ve always wanted to read are available for free as eBooks.  I just didn’t want to have to read them on my computer screen.  There are also some mainstream fiction and sci-fi/fantasy books that I would like to get that are available inexpensively as eBooks. 

The decision to get an eBook reader came as purely a measure to save space and a little bit of money.  I started to do some research and compared both the Kindle and the Nook.  Ultimately, I settled on the Nook because I could go to a Barnes & Noble store and actually test the screen to see if I liked it, and the memory is expandable with microSD cards.

I ordered my Nook about 13 days ago.  I’ve currently had it for about 6 days.  When I ordered it, I realized that I was definitely going to want to be able to hold it like a traditional book, so I ordered the Jonathan Adler Punctuation Cover for it, along with the booklight  and an extra AC adapter.  I had enough money left over from my budgeting to order two books; I chose Craig Ferguson’s American on Purpose and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight.  I thought that to test the full effect, I’d want  to read both a book I hadn’t ever read before and one that was an old favorite.

I read American on Purpose first.  To my surprise, I adjusted very quickly to having to click a button to turn the page.  The screen does flash briefly as the page turns.  It doesn’t bother me all that much, and didn’t even initially.  I think that being able to hold the Nook in the book-style cover eased the transition to an eBook reader.  It’s heavier than the average paperback, but not as heavy as a hardback.  The size is fairly comperable to a trade paperback, though the print, even in a medium font, is larger than the average printed book.

Page numeration won’t match between a traditional book and an eBook, which is a shame, but the Nook makes it very easy to mark passages of the eBook that you might want to revisit later (perhaps a specific quote or a band name), and it’s possible to make your own annotations and notes.  The Nook automatically saves the page you were last reading when  you turn it off, which is a nice feature, especially if you get interrupted.

I spent a considerable portion of last week on the Project Gutenberg website.  There is a wide variety of material available there, including a good selection of classics of literature.  I was excited to find a large number of fairy tale and folklore titles available that would allow me to read editions that just aren’t widely available or commonly reprinted. Downloading them to my computer was very easy, and transferring them to the Nook was even easier. I just plugged my Nook into my computer via USB, and it loaded drivers onto my computer, then dragged and dropped folders into the Nook’s directory.

In the less than two weeks that I’ve had my Nook, there’s been a software update.  It had to be manually downloaded from the Barnes & Noble website, but it wasn’t hard to find, and it wasn’t difficult to do.  There were step-by-step instructions to follow directly on the website. 

I also set up a custom screensaver with my own images.  The instructions in the owner’s manual were fairly confusing, but Barnes & Noble has a Nook forum that provides technical assistance, and I found much better instructions there which made the process quick and painless.  My custom screensaver is loaded and running smoothly.  I didn’t get my own wallpaper working yet, but I figured out fairly quickly what I was doing wrong, and that will be fixed in short order.

Another consideration for me to buy the Nook was that about once every three months, I take an 8-hour bus ride to see my parents.  Packing books is never an easy choice, because I can usually get through an average sci-fi/fantasy book one way, and there’s even less space in my luggage than there is on my bookshelves.  Taking a really big book adds extra weight and some frustration, because I won’t necessarily be able to get back to it while I’m home, and in the course of jostling around my luggage the bookmarks frequently fall out and actual damage to the books occurs.  I really find it distasteful when my books get damaged.  Now, though, my Nook stores around 1,000 books–so if I finish one book, I can start another one.  And of course they all take the same amount of space as just one book.

I didn’t have to charge my Nook for the entire first week that I had it, and I was reading from it for around 2 hours every day.  I didn’t really have to charge it when I finally did (as it still had about 50% charge), but I thought that I should probably just go ahead and charge it up anyway.  Initially, when I took it out of the package, it said to charge the Nook fully before the first use and indicated that it would take around 3 and 1/2 hours.  It actually took more like five, but, admittedly, I was playing with buttons, so that was probably what accounted for the extra charging time.

The only real drawback that I see, other than some books I’d like to read in eBook format simply not being available, is that I do have to wait for the Nook to start up and load the book that I’m currently reading.  There’s no lag time with a traditional book, which I really appreciate, since when I want to read, I usually want to read right then.  It’s difficult to be patient when you are grabbing a few minutes to read here and there.

Thus far, I actually really like my Nook.  I’ve adjusted reasonably well to the difference in reading from a screen, which looks remarkably like a book page and so doesn’t require much getting used to, and clicking to turn pages.  I don’t like the lag time, and I’m a bit disgruntled that my favorite short story of all time, Fritz Leiber’s “Space time for Springers” is not available for the Nook yet (while I COULD get it for the Kindle).  The little book light is helpful in low light to prevent eyestrain, and I would highly recommend purchasing it along with your Nook.

So, if space is a consideration for you in terms of your library, and you’d like to tote around at least 1,000 books everywhere you travel, the Nook would be a pretty sound investment.  I’m inordinately glad that I’ve purchased mine, and I never thought that I would say that about an eBook reader.