Search Highlights? Root? (New NST Owner)

[Agrajag]

I just got a Nook Simple Touch for Christmas and, so far, I have to say I vastly prefer it to the Kindle's my friends have. It was a breeze to get my "whopping" 30 ebooks onto it and everything is, so far, very enjoyable and simple.

Now I've gotten a couple questions moving forward:

1. I started heavily reading the first ebook on it and after a couple hundreds pages I realized I'd highlighted several key phrases. I then went to go find them and no matter where I look I don't seem to be able to find a feature that allows me to see highlights in a book. There must be a way to search for these things, no?

Also, many of the sections I highlighted refused to fully highlight. I'd select, say, a sentence and it would show that no problem until I clicked Highlight and then the highlight would change to just a subset of the words in that sentence. Is this a bug? Is it likely to be addressed?

2. I'm pretty technically proficient and comfortable. I own a Droid RAZR phone that's rooted and my original Droid was rooted and I'd run several various kernels and roms on it. I'm wondering, at this point, what the big benefits are to rooting right now. On XDA I saw references to it but they sounded (at least the threads I saw) less than ideal with real trade-offs on the down side to doing it. My first thought would be to possible find a better reader, better inventory manager. I might be slightly interested in Gmail access but only slightly. Should I bother? Is there an app or two that just screams that you pretty much have to root because the experience is just that much better?

Thanks all.

[Timur]

There is a Notes & Highlights tab in content(accessed with leftmost icon in book menu) window, alongside the TOC and Bookmarks tabs.