The New Nook Glowlight vs. The Kindle Paperwhite

Kindle Paperwhite vs. Nook Glowlight

After all the ups and downs of the last eighteen months or so, it's good to see Barnes and Noble confirming their commitment to their Nook range by launching a new version of the Glowlight e-reader.

It's a well timed move, just in time for the Christmas gift giving rush. There will be the inevitable comparisons between the Kindle Paperwhite and the new Nook Glowlight - so here's a quick comparison for you. Just use the left and right arrows to move through the presentation.

Kindle Paperwhite vs Nook Glowlight 2013 from Thamisgith

So, which reader is best?In reality, there's not a great deal to choose from between the two readers. Most people will probably choose based upon whether they prefer to buy their e-books from one store or another.

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The Nook Glowlight 2013

After waiting about eighteen months since the launch of the Nook Simple Touch With Glowlight, Barnes and Noble has finally updated its flagship e-reader. The new Nook Glowlight, 2013 edition, is now available.

Here's a brief summary of its key features. Use the arrow keys to move backwards and forwards through the presentation:

Nook Glowlight 2013 from Thamisgith

It's good to see that B&N is still committed to the e-reader market. There were all sorts of rumors about their Nook division being sold off last year. This should give B&N's loyal customers a little more confidence that the book selling giant will be in the e-book market for some time to come.

This is the smallest and lightest Nook to date. It weighs in at just 6.2 ounces (the Kindle Paperwhite is 7.5 ounces). It really does feel very light in your hand.

It no longer has physical page turn buttons, which is a shame in my opinion. I always thought that those buttons were a nice touch and that they gave users more options when it came to using their reader.

There's no slot for an SD card reader either - but with 4GB of memory, which should be enough for about 2,000 books, this won't be something which bothers the large majority of Glowlight users.

Hopefully the Nook Glowlight 2013 model will sell well for B&N in the run up to Christmas. Whether or not you prefer it to the Kindle Paperwhite doesn't matter too much. It's good for consumers that there is some healthy competition in the market. That always drives development of new features and helps to keep prices down.

Nook Simple Touch To Get Web Browser And E-Mail Facility

If you're the proud owner of a Nooks Simple Touch e-reader - with or without "Glowlight" - then you are about to receive an unexpected upgrade. Whether you were aware of it or not, the Nook Simple Touch has been shipping with a "hidden" web browser for some time now. All units shipped since 2011 will have this facility.

Barnes and Noble now intends to release a software update to activate both web browsing and e-mail functionality on its readers. It should be a welcome addition for Nook owners everywhere.

B&N has struggled to catch up with the Amazon Kindle readers and tablets - but it has really been upping its game of late. Last year it expanded its market by starting to sell the Nook range in the UK. Just recently, massive price drops, first in the UK and then in the USA (via Radio Shack outlets) saw the Nook enjoy better sales than ever before.

This latest development certainly won't do any harm to B&N's prospects.

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Kindle Fire HD Tablet Computer

I recently got my wife a Kindle Fire HD tablet for her birthday. Given her longstanding hatred of technology (she doesn't like using her antiquated mobile phone), that may seem more like grounds for divorce than a recipe for marital bliss. However, she absolutely loves it. Adores it in fact.

My better half needs to keep in touch by e-mail, like many of us do. Until now, that has been a stressful experience for her. Switching on a notebook, firing up windows and getting "on the line", as she likes to call it, was never pleasant - not for her or for anyone else within earshot.

There's none of that with her new tablet. Switch it on and one tap takes her to her Gmail account. It really couldn't be easier or simpler.

It's a similar situation for other mail services such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Twitter and Facebook also have one tap access functionality.

It's been a liberating experience for my wife. I the space of a few days she was dealing with e-mails with confidence - something which has never happened before! She has now graduated to watching TV shows and movies on her Kindle and is the self appointed family "Googler" now.

All things considered, the ease of use of touch screen tablets in general - and the Fire HD in particular - make them a great, if somewhat surprising, gift choice for anyone who doesn't especially enjoy using technology but who wants the benefits that it can bring.

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Kindle Fire Covers

Both my son and myself got Kindle Fire tablets for Xmas this year. I'm not usually too bad when it comes to buying gadgets, but this time I forgot to get him a cover. I bought it in a bit of a hurry - Amazon had reduced the price for 24 hours only - that's my excuse.

My own Fire was a gift from my dear wife. It was a pleasant surprise - and I wouldn't expect her to think of things like covers.

Anyway, it wasn't too much of a big deal. I just went on to Amazon on Xmas day, picked out a Kindle Fire cover for the two of us, and they arrived the day after Boxing day.

It certainly makes it easier to watch videos. I chose covers which double as stands - so he can prop his Kindle up and watch videos in bed very easily.

To be fair to my son, he hardly watches TV at all. Like a lot of kids these days, he seems to get most of his videos from YouTube - so the Kindle Fire is an ideal device for him.

Both of the Fires are associated with my Amazon account. I signed up for the LoveFilm instant access account which lets both of us watch unlimited videos online. It's pretty good. I've been watching a fair bit of Red Dwarf over the past couple of days or so! It's good fun catching up.

Amazon And Barnes And Noble Fight For Festive Season Sales

This time last year Amazon and Barnes and Noble were slugging it out for their respective shares of the festive gift giving bonanza with the Kindle touch and the Nook Simple Touch. B&N has actually got the Nook to market several weeks ahead of Amazon - and a lot of reviewers felt that it was a slightly better product than the Kindle - from a purely technical perspective.

Nevertheless, when the dust settled and the sales were totted up in January 2012, Amazon was ebullient and B&N was more than a little downcast. Most analysts felt that Amazon had won the Christmas sales battle - by some distance.

Twelve months down the line, the two key protagonists in the e-reader market are at it again. This time Amazon has the Kindle Paperwhite, which they have modestly announced as "the world's most advanced e-reader". Barnes and Noble has the Nook Glowlight, or to give it its full title the "Nook Simple Touch With Glowlight".

What's in a name in the end? Well, when you look at it closely, the Nook Simple Touch With Glowlight is exactly what the name implies - it's a Nook Simple Touch with a light added. The Paperwhite on the other hand is a much more serious upgrade and enhancement of the Kindle Touch, which is now withdrawn.

Whereas the Glowlight is the Simple Touch with a light, the Paperwhite boasts a new whiter display (it is a lot whiter - but it's not totally white), increased pixel density, improved contrast and a light which is more evenly dispersed over the surface of the e-ink display than the Glowlight's.

Once again, B&N has beaten Amazon to the punch by getting their product to market faster - but the Paperwhite looks to have the edge on the Glowlight technically.

The two main selling points for the Glowlight are the fact that it doesn't have any ads on it (it costs an extra $ 20 to have these removed from the Paperwhite) and the provision of a slot for an SD memory card.

On the face of it, Amazon's legion of customers don't seem to be too bothered about the ads - or they're happy to pay the additional fee to have them removed. They certainly don't seem to be impacting sales too much since they were introduced. The Kindle remains, in all of its various forms, the top selling item on the Amazon website - a position which it has held for well over three years now.

As far as the SD card slot goes, that gives you the facility to boost your memory from 2 GB up to 32 GB. That means that instead of carrying 1,000 books around with you, you will be able to tote something like 30,000 e-books with you wherever you go.

At a rate of a book a week, 1,000 books would keep you going for a little over 19 years. 30,000 books is enough for a lifetime of reading - and even then, you're going to need to read awfully fast. It's somewhat debatable just how useful that SD slot functionality actually is for the average bookworm. Nevertheless, some people like the idea of being able to boost their reader's memory.

But, in the end, I suspect that not enough people will find the ads objectionable enough or the massive, boosted memory desirable enough to tip the scales in favor B&N. On the balance of probabilities, and also on past performance, you would have to suspect that Amazon is all set to wipe the floor with B&N in the Paperwhite versus Glowlight shootout that's currently going on.

Make no mistake about it, these are both good readers - and either one would serve you well. But the Paperwhite is going to be found under an awful lot more trees than the Glowlight on Christmas day 2012.

http://ebookreaderscribblings.com/e-readers/kindle-voyage-e-reader/

Amazon Battle Barnes And Noble For Ebook Reader Dominance

The market for dedicated ebook readers appears to have turned into a bit of a head to head confrontation between Amazon and Barnes and Noble at the moment. It's true that Barnes and Noble have been a distant second for some time now, but the recently launched updated Nook reader might allow them to make up ground on Amazon's almost ubiquitous Kindle in the near future.

It has a touch screen e-ink technology display, which some people will definitely prefer and which allows the QWERTY keypad to be dispensed with. The end result is a reader which is both smaller and lighter.

There was an element of controversy regarding the battery life of the new Nook reader. A span of two months between battery charges was claimed by B&N - double the Kindle's published one month battery life. However, it should be noted that this figure assumes half an hour's worth of reading on a daily basis. Amazon claimed one month between charges - but this was based upon one hour's worth of reading a day.

The published Kindle battery life has now been increased to two months between charges - but Amazon has also made it clear exactly how that figure is derived.

In reality, it's probably a bit of a fuss over nothing. E-ink technology screens only use power when the display is being changed - when you are "turning the page" in other words. Which means that the time between battery charges depends on how often you turn a page rather than the amount of time that you spend reading. However, unless you are a particularly fast or slow reader, it probably won't make a great deal of difference to you.

In a similar vein, whether or not your reader will last for a month, or for two months, on a single charge is probably not a big deal for most people. It's long enough either way. You can set off on a long journey secure in the knowledge that your reader won't die on you half way to your destination. You don't have to pack your charger before setting off on vacation or on a business trip. Those are the types of things that people tend to think about when choosing an e-reader, or any other portable electronic device for that matter.

On the other hand, such minor, and relatively inconsequential, fine details are enormously important to both Barnes and Noble and Amazon and we may see further tiffs provoked in the Kindle vs Nook ebook reader sweepstakes during the upcoming months.

The Kindle is the best selling product on the Amazon website. Sales of Kindle readers and books are forecast to net Amazon something in the region of $ 4 billion by the end of the year. Sales of Kindle related items are expected to generate over 10% of Amazon's income by 2012. Not bad for a product which first launched just three and a half years ago.

It's a similar story for Barnes and Noble. At a time when sales from their traditional bricks and mortar outlets are in decline, digital sales are up by 50%. B&N are now selling three times as many ebooks as they are physical books - so the Nook is every bit as important to them as the Kindle is to Amazon.