Quote:
Originally Posted by huda
Hi Mgmueller,
Great thread. Thanks for all the info. I found this thread as I was planning to buy my first device. From your ranking, I've finally come down with 2 options Nook or Neo. (I was actually considering Cool-er but I thought since you, who probably have pretty much all device under the sun does not own one, I'm not gonna risk it. BTW why don't you have the Cool-er?)
I have a few questions that I hope you could help me with:
The bebook neo, I read from HarryT it has a "most recently read" page feature, does nook have this?
What I am actually looking for is "most recently read books". From what I gathered most device just sort by alphabetical order. I read multiple books at a time and often forget which ones I'm reading and I don't want to scroll through hundreds of book to go to the one I am reading. Any device that has this function?
Bookmarking, I’ve seen devices that has 3-4 steps just to bookmark? How is it in Neo and Nook? I just want to do it at a click of a button, something simple akin to the MS Reader, which I am using now to read ebooks.
For your .lit books, which device do you use? Bebook is the only one I know that can read that format and since you don't normally use this coz it's ugly (which is I most certainly agree with) do you convert the books? Which format looks best for lit after converting?
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Concerning the Cool-er: Sorry for my frank response - didn't very much like what I read and saw in reviews.
nook does have a feature "reading now" for the very last book.
Not very much, as I usually read 3 to X books in parallel.
But: I sort (the B&N books in my library) by "most recent". Before opened for the very first time, it's sorting by the download time. After having opened it, the respective title moves to today's date. So I always see my most recent purchases and reads. Not perfect, I'd love to keep my books sorted by the date of purchase.
But as nook doesn't (yet?) have folder support (*), the idea is deleting (=archiving) the read books.
The solution is very workable for me.
(*) You can "softroot" nook (="hacking" the Android OS). Then you can add folder support and other features.
Bookmarking is very easy on Neo of course (touchscreen). In general, Neo is very efficient. You have a touchscreen and a fully blown jogdial solution. You simply tap the stylus for adding a bookmark or push the 5-way-button once to the top for increasing font size.
On nook, it's a bit less efficient, but good enough. You use the touchscreen, jump to the menu "bookmark" and add your bookmark.
I've stripped lots of my .lit files from DRM and have them on BeBook One. But as you say: I'm rarely using it because "it's ugly".
I use "calibre" for conversion. Usually I convert all books into ePUB and Mobipocket. With these 2 formats, I can cover the vast majority of my readers. .lit is a very good format for conversion, acceptable results on both target formats.
Concerning your 2 momentary favorites:
Your choice is very interesting, because nook and Neo are very different. I'd perfectly understand deciding between Neo and iRex 800 or nook and Kindle 2 for example.
In general, my differentiation between Neo and nook:
nook ist the "perfect" casual reader. It looks great. 6" for casual reads is absolutely fine. The touchscreen is a looker and fun to use. I love WiFi and 3G to browse the B&N bookstore while on the road. I almost exclusively use nook for the B&N books. For sideloading books from 3rd party sources, in my opinion there are better solutions in the market. For example I prefer iRex 800 for that (huge libraries way better can be sorted in folder view on iRex 800, than on nook's "flat" structure).
BeBook Neo to me still is a mixed package. Its featureset is impressive and for its price it's benchmark. But I haven't found the right niche, yet. For casual reads, I prefer nook. For "professional" documents, I still miss some features on iRex 800, but I trust in the firmware update due in 4 weeks.
If you give a few examples of typical usage you plan (3G important or not, downloading books while on the road, annotation capability, touchscreen interface or not, ...), I can give you my personal recommendation.
Without knowing your criterias, my "blind" recommendations always will be (for now): Sony 900, iRex 800, Kindle 2, nook, BeBook Neo, Cybook Opus (no specific order).