barnes and noble

What It Does Right

It's Fun
The Kindle was elegant but bland. The Nook is designed to pop. It's got a small color navigation screen, the ability to easily load your own photos, and it just begs to be touched. Put this and a Kindle in front of a kid, and they'll reach for the one with color every time. Even the accessories appeared to be well-designed.

It Takes Advantage of Amazon's Lax Attitude
The Kindle has been out since the beginning of 2008—and it has barely changed since. The Nook represents, if nothing else, a massive upgrade in terms of what an e-book reader can do—namely color, wireless sharing and in-store browsing. Was Amazon asleep at the wheel? We'll see for sure when it rolls out its next upgrade, but it shouldn't have given Barnes & Noble this opportunity.

It Takes Advantage of B&N's Infrastructure
Amazon is a virtual retailer. Barnes & Noble's hundreds of physical megastores (and college bookstores) give them a huge infrastructure from which to push the Nook. At the launch event, they showed off a sample of the in-store display they plan on using to show off the device. It's going to be a huge presence.

It Uses Android
The Nook isn't launching with an avalanche of any third-party applications (or any, really), but the fact that its software is based on Google's open Android platform means that it would be very easy for Barnes & Noble to turn on that faucet.

Where It Goes Wrong

Confusing Content Restrictions
All the fun content seems to be locked up in so many differing restrictions, that it could prove extremely confusing for customers. For example, some books will be available for device-to-device wireless lending, but not others. These and other restrictions require explanation, and nothing in gadgets should require explanation these days.

The Name
Maybe it'll grow on me, but I'm not a fan of "Nook"—and nor were most of the other journalists I polled.

There's Some Retail Arrogance
If you want to buy the Nook at a physical store, you have to go to a Barnes & Noble. This will get the book-lovers, but it could cause them to miss on casual gadget-buyers—the type of people browsing Best Buy.

It Uses AT&T
The Kindle's use of Sprint for over-the-air downloads has proved speedy and reliable. You don't need huge pipes to send a book, but AT&T's 3G network is riddled with so many dead spots in some cities (such as New York), that the Nook's reliance on it could prove extremely aggravating for would-be customers. To Barnes & Noble's credit, the fact that the Nook has no Web browser means that this effect should be minimized.

The Second Screen
The single greatest advantage of an E Ink screen is its nearly endless battery life. A beautiful, bright, color capacitive touchscreen can only harm that. It's also a startlingly inefficient use of screen space, with a large portion of the face of the device inaccessible as a reading surface. When I'm constantly flipping pages, I could see myself loathing the blank touchscreen hogging up precious square inches at the bottom.

To Be Seen

Book Lending
I love the idea of being able to lend books between Nooks. Even better—the system will work with other e-book readers that operate on the Barnes & Noble e-book store ecosystem (such as those made by Plastic Logic). But this wireless content-sharing scheme was tried once before by Microsoft with the first Zune (they gave it the unfortunate name of "squirting")—and it failed miserably. This feature will live and die by whether and how well the device sells—it simply needs to reach a critical mass where people have enough Nook-enabled friends to make use of it.