[EldRick]

Got it this morning. Played with it for a few hours. I like the Nook Touch lots better:

- The touchscreen is very sluggish, and rarely picks up my first tap. Paging becomes an exercise in annoyance.

- The horrible default (and system) serif font, Georgia, is nearly unreadable on this small screen. It is a shaded font, with varying stroke widths, and the low-res rendering on an e-ink screen gives blotchy-looking text, where the letters and serifs are very poorly rendered.

I don't even consider reading books in san-serif fonts; note that almost no books are ever published in a san-serif font - there's a good reason for that - readability suffers.

I've read over a hundred books on Kindle, and a half-dozen on the Nook Touch, and I've never failed to find a comfortable combination of font, line spacing, and margins, but the Kobo Touch defeated me - I can't stand to read on it.

- The default margin is flush against the screen edges. Since I remove publishers' margins with calibre and depend on the ereader to set a narrow margin, this is annoying, since the text near the edges is shadowed by the bezel.

- It is VERY slow in some cases. In resetting to factory defaults (to return it), it took me five tries to get it to actually respond to tapping the Reset button. This is probably an artifact of a remarkably insensitive touch screen.

- The hardware buttons on the Nook are very useful for reading single-handed.

I found the combination of sluggish performance, annoying touchscreen, and badly-chosen font makes the Touch irritating in a way the Nook Touch and the Kindle 3 never are. As I said, it's on its way back to Borders...

UPDATE: Based on their rapid improvements in the type support and other fixes, I've ordered a second KT. I have great hopes for the new type support.