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Originally Posted by The-eBook-Reader
3. Lending feature, even limited to once is a step forward for ebooks (not sure if authors and publishers are going to be on-board with this though; it's their discretion to allow this feature, like text-to-speech).
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I'm not sure that will be possible to quantify. We'll have to infer from teh catalogs which publishers bought in to the concept. The ones that allow it are hoping lending will help generate sales. The ones who don't are afraid lending will cost them sales. I think the former group are right, but can't prove it.
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4. User replaceable battery.
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Definite win
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5. B&N allows for reading their books on phones and PCs as well as the nook
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With qualifications. The nook supports ePub, PDF, and the legacy Fictionwise eReader format. So if what you want to reader is an eReader text, you can read it on all manner of things, as versions of the eReader viewer are available for a variety of platforms:
http://www.ereader.com/ereader/software/browse.htm
Support for newer ePub volumes is a bit more problematic. We may see a bit of competition between B&N and Amazon about porting versions of the reader software to other platforms for folks who want to buy the books but not necessarily use the readers.
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7. Wi-Fi, even though there's no browser, customers visiting B&N stores can look through entire books.
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And if they like it, can purchase and download it on the spot. But wifi is the transport, and separate from the ability to browse a full book. (The B&N folks said they didn't include a browser because they didn't think the browsing experience on an eInk device was good enough. We'll see whether that's an error on their part.)
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8. Micro SD memory card slot.
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Allowing (currently) 16GB storage per card. Folks who want to carry thier entire ebook library about with them should have no problem doing so.
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9. Native PDF and ePub support.
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Like Sony, they licensed Adobe's mobile SDK.
How big a win this is depends on where they go with it. The nook developers at the B&N launch party talked about liking Android because it was optimized for display on small screen devices. (I suspected "free, open source, and no licensing from Google required" were possibly more compelling reasons.)
But Android is modular, and adapted for mobile devices. The SDK is available, and a lot of developers are looking at the platform. Because Android is under the hood, there are an assortment of things that could potentially be done to enhance and extend the nook. The big question at the moment is whether B&N plans to open it to third party developers.
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Dennis