Touch Wifi downloads of public library books?

[bmbriefs]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to decide on which ereader to buy. I really like the price and the form factor of the nook simple touch, but the kindle touch and sony t1 have it beat when it comes to ease of public library lending.

Both the kindle and sony have ways to check out library books without plugging the device into your computer. Call me lazy, but I will be using public library books heavily and will find it a pain to download the library book to my computer and then attach my nook to transfer the library book to it. The kindle allows you to check out your library book online and it automatically downloads to your device and the Sony allows you to check out books directly from your device.

I read in a random blog post (which I can't find now!) that nook was working on a solution for checking out books wirelessly and it was due to be updated this Spring with the new functionality.

Has anybody else heard anything about this update? Believe it or not, this feature is worth the $30 difference in price between the nook and Sony. If the feature will be here in a couple of months, I'll just buy the nook and wait. If not, I'll go with the Sony.

thanks for your help!

[geertm]

Originally Posted by bmbriefs

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to decide on which ereader to buy. I really like the price and the form factor of the nook simple touch, but the kindle touch and sony t1 have it beat when it comes to ease of public library lending.

Both the kindle and sony have ways to check out library books without plugging the device into your computer. Call me lazy, but I will be using public library books heavily and will find it a pain to download the library book to my computer and then attach my nook to transfer the library book to it. The kindle allows you to check out your library book online and it automatically downloads to your device and the Sony allows you to check out books directly from your device.

I read in a random blog post (which I can't find now!) that nook was working on a solution for checking out books wirelessly and it was due to be updated this Spring with the new functionality.

Has anybody else heard anything about this update? Believe it or not, this feature is worth the $30 difference in price between the nook and Sony. If the feature will be here in a couple of months, I'll just buy the nook and wait. If not, I'll go with the Sony.

thanks for your help!

In a WSJ article at the end of last year B&N said we would get wireless library lending at the beginning of this year.
Overdrive has confirmed on their Facebook page that they are working on a Nook app.
That is the only information available.

Random House and Harper Collins are the only big publishers still selling books to libraries. Harper Collings has a lending limit of 26 times for a book. Random House just tripled ebookprices for libraries.
Penguin no longer allows wireless lending for their existing ebooks on Kindle.

[bmbriefs]

Thanks Geertm, I'm glad that it's comming soon. I was able to find the WSJ article.

[tomsem]

I have both devices (Nook STR and Sony PRS-T1) and would unreservedly recommend the latter, even if wireless library lending is added to Nook STR.

Nook STR effectively has no web browser, PDF support is inferior, and it has no landscape viewing (to mention just a few things). Sony works well with Dropbox, lets you easily look up terms on google and wikipedia, has better annotation features, you can zoom entire pages to view and pan around images or tables, it saves reading options on a per-item basis rather than per-device (really nice when you need to make adjustments for one book but don't want them to apply to everything). With Nook, I have to constantly reset reading options for each thing I'm reading as I switch between them, or else tolerate a less optimal reading experience (e.g. drop caps that aren't formatted properly, etc.).

Unlike Nook (and Kindle Touch), only 'swipe' effects page turn. That sounds like a limitation, but actually makes touch gestures less ambiguous and more efficient and less likely to respond to accidental touches. For example I can usually lift up a piece of lint off the screen with my fingertip by touching it, and without locking the screen first. Hyperlink navigation (single tap) works better since it can't be confused with a page turn gesture, or a selection gesture (tap and hold). And the Sony keeps track of every reading position established in a book, so you can always follow the 'breadcrumbs' back to where you were, and it is trivial to move back and forth between locations as you would with a web browser. On Nook, the 'take me back' button goes away if you navigate away from the initial landing page, so it is easier to get 'lost'.

Nook is better in some respects but I think Sony is a better reading device overall, and it is likely to remain that way throughout their respective life-cycles.

Nook will probably need to expose the web browser again if it is to support library lending, but we'll have to wait to see if browser functionality in general will be available, and indeed, to evaluate how well library borrowing works. Note that some library books are only available in PDF format. Without improvements to Nook's PDF support (specifically ability to crop on the device, and landscape viewing), these will not be very workable on Nook, whereas on Sony they usually are.

One consideration is that Sony will not read books from B&N currently; if you a B&N account with a library there, you won't be able to read them on Sony. There's a possibility that the next release of ADE will allow you to load B&N books onto Sony (which is not supported by the current version of ADE), but that's far from certain at this point.

Though Kindle library borrowing integration is very good (and provides option to read on any device linked to your Kindle account, with sync and annotation backup), I prefer using Sony because of the generally richer formatting of ePub and the better reading options (including ability to read PDF, better navigation options, etc). I do all my 'shopping' on a computer browser to populate my 'wish list' and then Sony can easily access that. By contrast, Overdrive hosted web sites don't detect when a Kindle web browser is being used and they have not created a good web experience for Kindles to use; the assumption is that you are using a computer browser to do Kindle borrowing, which is certainly a lot easier to deal with. It's possible to borrow using Kindle only, in a pinch, but not very pleasant.