A (long) Nook Color review from an experienced ebook reader

[Liviu_5]

I got one on Sunday - saw it last Friday at BN and would have bought it on the spot, but they were out of the 4 reserved/refused ones, with the last sold in front of me

Luckily Best Buy near me got 5 on Saturday; after calling all the BN around and putting my name on their list at each, i found out Sat night that BB sells them too and when i saw that the Hartsdale store has them in stock, I was there Sunday morning at the open...

My Sony 700 died this spring after 18 months of heavy use when only the Itouch saw some reading use on the go and they replaced it with a cool, crisp and fast Sony 650 (extended warranty, so free but no more 700's) but the 650 has no reading light and it's very hard to use at home without lighting the house like a store since I hate reading lamps, book lights and all... Great for park, library/bookstore use, but...

So back to the faithful Nokia 770 still going strong since 2006 for home use and the joys of triple device book maintenance especially that Calibre services the PRS and the iTouch, but not the Nokia...

So when Nook Color was announced I was really curious - checked some earlier color readers like the Pandigital one at Best Buy which is slow and sluggish - and the in-store demo just sold me on it.

After using it for several days with both epubs and pdf's (some huge including with heavy color pictures and the like), Nook Color is just awesome.

I have pretty much only my content and deleted the BN stuff from the BN account and Calibre works perfectly with it, as does drag and drop on the PC.

I have tried web browsing and it does a decent job so i may use it the way i use my iTouch now when i need something online quickly somewhere where there is wi-fi (bed, library, bookstore, Mcdonalds and the like) but no more.

I have not tried music, audio books (except for the read aloud feature for one of the children book they offer as sample at Bn and that is good) or video since I have no interest in that for now on NC.

So I will talk about epubs, pdf's and miscellanea

Epubs: I use Sepia with varying brightness (in home 20%, lighted store closer to 50%, outdoors same though not yet seen it in bright sun - November and all). Excellent navigation with page cursor, fast, intuitive bookmarking, good in-book menu; fonts i use as they go but so far I need lower size than on the PRS 650 for reading - the NC is just clearer; bookmarks seem to be internal to the book and not in the same place as in the Sony line

Search works well though there is no enter page number, just cursor navigation, but with page displayed as you move the cursor and pretty fine cursor pinpointing at what number you want not the jerky one of the PRS
On the 650/700 go-to-page works better

Two ways of moving pages (swipe left page back, tap right page for ahead, the opposite for back)

Superb - and I cannot overemphasize this - rendering of Spanish, Romanian, French characters; seems to work only with European fonts perfectly and with others only in some cases as per the guide, so you need to use pdf's or embedded fonts in epubs for such, but for what i need it's just awesome

Pdf's: the best handling I've seen so far in a small device; crisp rendering of color pictures, fast zooms either with the fingers or with a screen button under the device; superb navigation with enter page# from the pdf in-book menu which is very different than the epub; no search, bookmarking or in-book links/contents so far and hopefully those will be added but that is a minor annoyance for now
Page number appears on top at a tap in a faded but big font so it's not a distraction and you need to remember it (roughly) if you change books, but the go-to-page is pretty instantaneous

Moving pages is done by swiping top-bottom ahead, bottom-top, back, though once in a while fiddling at the left/right edges with zooms moved pages also, but I am not sure why/how

Again cannot emphasize how fast is the pdf load and how crisp are the books - i have a double page scan admittedly of a small format book but still...that you can read in horizontal mode as is, without zooming, scrolling...

Can scroll and all if needed too while have no real idea how reflow works but the NC is so crisp, reflow is not needed most of the time unless the pdf started very small fonted so with lots of characters per page, otherwise just zoom it to the fit page and you can read it comfortably

Misc: library sees all your books if you put them in the appropriate place and while I had an issue once when I disconnected the NC and it said something about being corrupted (calibre was still putting a book on it and I forgot), restarting fixed it;

No delete in-device, need to use either the files or Calibre delete, while for BN books, need to go to your account there

have option of arranging books chronologically in access mode not like in the PRS line only in "when on device" mode - here access means "when on device" too, so adding new books bumps them to the top, but when you read from a book that goes to the top; this is just superb since in the PRS I needed to use Notes for that, in the iTouch there is only a 5 book limit (for Stanza which is the only thing i use there btw) and FbReader on the 770 used to have up to 100 recent book remembering, but now it has only 10

Here no issue; can order on authors/title but do not need; same with other ways of displaying the library in which i am not interested - just chronological list; I do not use shelves and the like since search gives me any book on NC instantly and chronological order allows me to move in-between the latest reads directly (for pdf's as above, need to go-to-page since no bookmarking or remembering of place-in-book for now, but again that is fast)

Library or whole NC search impressive and real time - type one letter, two letters... it gets you there; that + chronological ordering makes perfect

Book covers - hit or miss as others noted, but could not care less

Weight/handling - while the PRS is lighter, the NC feels solid and it's not a drag reading one handed and writing or doing something else; does not feel to have 1 lb, while the form size is perfect (the biggest failure of the iPad for a reader like me is that it essentially needs 3 hands and it's a bit on the heavy side too)

Charging/USB connection - so far, so good; heavy use gave me good hours (4-5 and i had 50% left -you can check precise battery charge with the in_nook menu under device, as well as see it on an outside bar roughly) and I charge it daily, but I miss USB charging and the prop. adapter is ultra-annoying; hopefully it won't break; the switch of the cable from USB slot to charger slot is also annoying, i would have preferred two cables

No cover/sleeve so far, I use the shorter one from the PRS 650 which is ok; i plan to get a NC sleeve soon (goes for 9$ on eBay or 20$ at BN) ; I feel that cover would add too much bulk and i had no issues with my PRS 650 in a sleeve and even preferred it to the Prs 700 in its cover

Overall look - superb, elegant - with indicators for time (another pet peeve with the 700 and the Nokia 770 too for that matter), battery, sounds (have in-book on, system off) automatic notice indicator (eg when in BN it tells you can connect to them and read books for free..)
No buttons except for home and I do not mind that

BN in-store works beautifully - tried it twice (Su, Mo) and (fast) read one 700 book end-to-end (have a review copy for anyone questioning the propriety of that) in two sittings, tried another book and read about half too though this one seem to have page limits for in-store free reading or just that i have reached the hour, though the message i got said mentioned page limits (have a rv copy of that too)

The only negative is that now everyone in my family (eg my 9 year old son who was not really interested so far in reading from my 650 despite him being a heavy reader of print books and me having the odd upcoming pdf rv copy of children books he wants or the odd Gutenberg children books like Verne or Malot) wants it too...

Take a look at it in-store and you will see if it wows you, but personally i think that NC truly enriches book reading (it's not paper, but who cares - books were printed on regular paper in b&w for cost first foremost)

[geertm]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

Charging/USB connection - so far, so good; heavy use gave me good hours (4-5 and i had 50% left -you can check precise battery charge with the in_nook menu under device, as well as see it on an outside bar roughly) and I charge it daily, but I miss USB charging and the prop. adapter is ultra-annoying; hopefully it won't break; the switch of the cable from USB slot to charger slot is also annoying, i would have preferred two cables

With the screen off the Nook Color will charge from the USB port, but slowly compared to the Nook Color adapter.

You can use any USB cable for data transfer and USB charging, so you can use a seperate USB cable to connect to your PC. You only need the Nook Color USB cable to power charge using the Nook Color adapter (because this cable has 2 extra pins to get more power to the Nook).

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by geertm

With the screen off the Nook Color will charge from the USB port, but slowly compared to the Nook Color adapter.

You can use any USB cable for data transfer and USB charging, so you can use a seperate USB cable to connect to your PC. You only need the Nook Color USB cable to power charge using the Nook Color adapter (because this cable has 2 extra pins to get more power to the Nook).

Great to know; thanks!
will use my own regular cable then for books and keep the Nook one in the charger for when i need that

Totally agree on the quality and speed of this amazing device. I too use a spare USB cable for book transfer/PC connect.
A few annoyances with the browser (like having to scroll to top to go back a page) but this should be fixed once root is achieved and we can side load Opera.

Does anybody know what resolution book covers need to be. I had Calibre download a few - some look OK and some are pixelated?

[leday]

"Misc: library sees all your books if you put them in the appropriate place and while I had an issue once when I disconnected the NC and it said something about being corrupted (calibre was still putting a book on it and I forgot), restarting fixed it"

Question...what is the "appropriate place" to put your content so that the library will "see" them, and how do you set Calibre to download to this spot? I am thinking of getting one of these too. I love the Collections in the Sony 700, which is what I have. Can I put my personal content into collections (personal shelves) on the Nook too or will it only recognize content downloaded from B&N stores in the library?

[SCION]

Originally Posted by leday

"Misc: library sees all your books if you put them in the appropriate place and while I had an issue once when I disconnected the NC and it said something about being corrupted (calibre was still putting a book on it and I forgot), restarting fixed it"

Question...what is the "appropriate place" to put your content so that the library will "see" them, and how do you set Calibre to download to this spot? I am thinking of getting one of these too. I love the Collections in the Sony 700, which is what I have. Can I put my personal content into collections (personal shelves) on the Nook too or will it only recognize content downloaded from B&N stores in the library?

You can place sideloaded content on shelves. NOOKcolor doesn't recognize the tags in calibre the way the Sony does. You have to manually place any content on shelves (sideloaded or otherwise) on the device itself. This is disappointing. I, too, am fond of the way Sony Readers handle organization.

[leday]

Here's hoping Kovid can tackle this problem in a future release of Calibre and make tags organize into NookColor shelves.....wishful thinking??

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by leday

Here's hoping Kovid can tackle this problem in a future release of Calibre and make tags organize into NookColor shelves.....wishful thinking??

that's an interesting issue - i never used shelves on the PRS (collections or however they are called) and i doubt i will use them here since I found them a waste of time

as for Nook Color, Calibre automatically sends books to files/../books and the library sees them; i also copy paste there especially pdf's which i do not include in calibre unless i want to try and convert them

[leday]

It's good to know Calibre is compatible with this device (I LOVE Calibre!). Most of the books I have are parts of series, so I used the collections feature in my PRS700 to separate them into their series so I can organize/find them easily. I would probably use the shelves feature in the Nook, but it would be nice if Calibre can do this automatically when downloading the book to the device (like it does with the Sony) instead of having to do this manually AFTER the book is downloaded.

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by leday

It's good to know Calibre is compatible with this device (I LOVE Calibre!). Most of the books I have are parts of series, so I used the collections feature in my PRS700 to separate them into their series so I can organize/find them easily. I would probably use the shelves feature in the Nook, but it would be nice if Calibre can do this automatically when downloading the book to the device (like it does with the Sony) instead of having to do this manually AFTER the book is downloaded.

I see what you are saying; I have lots of series and such (eg same author books) too, and with the PRS 650 it was sometimes tricky to find them - author/sort, go to letter was fastest, but here you just type two letters of the author name or title, three letters... real time the titles appear until you narrow down to what you want; to me this is one of the best features and once you do it without thinking, you will see that it finds you anything much faster than several touches (eg go into shelves, pick the right one, scroll down if you have more than the books showed on one screen...)

And you can do it for the whole Nook and it is as fast and actually you can do it combined with the Internet and Wikipedia (if you have wi-fi of course) since once you start typing in letters in the global search, it offers you the options:

results Nook for *****
search Web for *****
search Wikipedia for ******

Very useful if you read something and want to bone up fast about some event or personality

[madsquabbles]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

Great to know; thanks!
will use my own regular cable then for books and keep the Nook one in the charger for when i need that

i don't think anyone's done a full breakdown of the cable yet, but my suspicion is that the extra pins in the cable are only to read the charge level so that it displays the correct led color so you know when your nook is fully charged.

any cable can be used but without checking in on your device you'll have no idea if it's completely charged. now to get a fast charge you'll need a 9.8watt or 10watt adapters (which will be easier to find since ipads use 10watt).

i've been using a standard micro usb cable and a panasonic 10watt adapter with no problems.

[simplyparticular]

Originally Posted by leday

Here's hoping Kovid can tackle this problem in a future release of Calibre and make tags organize into NookColor shelves.....wishful thinking??

Kovid already answered in the Calibre forum that the shelves cannot be edited via USB connection, so it looks like it is a no-go unless B&N changes the shelves structure.

So maybe some intrepid user will figure out how to edit the Shelves file, like the genius who figured out how to edit the Collections .json on the Kindle.

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by madsquabbles

i don't think anyone's done a full breakdown of the cable yet, but my suspicion is that the extra pins in the cable are only to read the charge level so that it displays the correct led color so you know when your nook is fully charged.

any cable can be used but without checking in on your device you'll have no idea if it's completely charged. now to get a fast charge you'll need a 9.8watt or 10watt adapters (which will be easier to find since ipads use 10watt).

i've been using a standard micro usb cable and a panasonic 10watt adapter with no problems.

great to know; will keep this for future reference since I truly hate proprietary stuff like that (adapters, cables..) since sometimes they are so hard to find

[boswd]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

great to know; will keep this for future reference since I truly hate proprietary stuff like that (adapters, cables..) since sometimes they are so hard to find

I don't think it's proprietary per say, I just think it's not a widely used charger.

The verbage of the nook charger is almost identicle to the verbage of the manual for my Droid X charger. ( chargers specially designed for this model of Droid X for faster, stronger charge, you should not charger your Droid X on another charger, you MAY damage the battery yadda yadda yadda)

This weekend I will compare specs on the two chargers and see if they are the same.

but I've charged my Droid X on my nook classic charger on many occasions, nothing bad has happened yet.

but in the mean time I will still just use my nook color charger.

[bossfan2000]

Hey Liviu..glad to see you love your color nook! I just posted a longish review on my blog, and I'm going to update it to add a link to your review here.