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 The Paperwhite on the other hand is a much more serious upgrade and enhancement of the Kindle Touch, which is now withdrawn.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/
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.
