So reads the strap line for Barnes & Noble Nook. For those of you who aren’t familiar with American book retailers, Wikipedia says:

Barnes & Noble, Inc. is the largest book retailer in the United States, operating mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores headquartered in lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

I should mention at this point that I have a great fondness for Barnes & Noble, having visited this amazing (and huge) store in Baltimore in 2000, it may have had something to do with this being the first book shop I’d ever been in which had a cafe (great idea btw.)

Equatable with Waterstone’s here in the UK, B&N operate both on the high street and online, selling physical and electronic books and a range of ebook readers. In late 2009 B&N launched their own reader, the Nook, into an increasingly crowded marketplace, in direct competition with Amazon’s Kindle 2. In what would seem to be lessons learnt from competitors, Amazon and Sony, the Nook featured both a 6″ e-ink display and an LCD touchscreen, avoiding the Kindle’s sluggish e-ink based menu navigation and the glare from the Reader Touch. Powered by Android and featuring both an AT&T 3G Sim and Wifi for OTA purchases, on first glance the Nook seemed to represent the next generation of ebook readers, but after initial reviews hit the internet, it seemed that was not the case. The Nook’s Android (1.5) OS was accused of being unstable and buggy and page turns were slooow. Hackers at Nookdevs discovered the whole operating system ran of a MicroSD card, which gave users the impression that the slowness was a hardware problem, rather than a problem that could be fixed with firmware. Along with delays of Christmas Nook orders (well into the new year) and the talk of an impending “Kindle killer” from Apple, the Nook seems to have dropped from off the tech radar entirely for most people. I am not most people.

After determining my Kindle DX was just too big for reading novels (in the interim, my usage patterns had changed along with my job) and so after selling the DX, my options seemed to be the aforementioned Kindle 2 or the Sony Reader Touch. After checking out Mark’s Sony Touch I felt the glare was too much for me; I liked the idea of the International 3G on the Kindle 2, but it’s limited to Amazon and Wikipedia only, so not a huge advantage then. The Nook, on the other hand, had in the interim received two firmware updates, improving speed and stability, had been rooted (similar to jailbreaking an iPhone) and could now run a Web browser, Pandora and could download directly from Stanza and Calibre libraries using Trook. All using wifi, meaning they would work in the UK, unlike the Nook’s 3G, starting to sound good?

Thanks to USUnlocked.com I was able to order a Nook and have it sent to the UK, for less than the price of a Kindle 2 (which adds tax, shipping and customs charges to its base price) and have been putting it through it’s paces over the past week. Initially I had planned a technical review in this post, but after some sage advice, I’m going to hold it off for another time along the some hi-res photos. Leaving this post to focus on my initial hands on reaction.

• The packaging is pretty, Apple pretty, but nigh on impossible to get into, unless you are a member of mensa. In fact it’s so nice, that I’ve used the sleeve and an old moleskine notebook to create a tidy case.
• The Nook is solid, but heavy, my wife reckons that it’s heavier than the Kindle DX, but Wikipedia disagrees.
• I’ve read that the design of the Nook is plasticky and cheap looking, but I find it quite stylish.
• It fits nicely into your hand thanks to an ergonomically curved back.
• All ebook readers should come with the default screensaver saying “Don’t Panic.” It should become law or something.
• Boot-up takes forever and a day, although resume from sleep is very fast, possibly faster than the Kindle.
• Once you update to firmware 1.1.1 page turns are fine, not bearable, not slower than the Kindle, fine, meaning not a problem.
• Once rooted you can do all kinds of fun stuff like replacing fonts (I like Georgia) and using Trook, letting me download books and news feeds from my Calibre library
• The touch screen is not an iPhone, but it’s useable, more so than the Kindle DX’s keyboard
• Unless you turn Airplane mode on and set the touchscreen backlight timer to 10s, the battery drains within a day or two. With those set, you might get a week, we’ll see.
• Like the Kindle the Nook doesn’t use folders to sort books, unlike the Kindle it offers no sort options, books seem to order themselves whatever way they feel.
• Removing the back cover is ok, but it makes scary cracking noises, so be brave.
• Inside you have a MicroSD slot, removable battery (sort of) and a sim card, remove more of the casing and as reported there is another MicroSD slot containing the file system and OS.
• I like the size and shape.
• The screen has great contrast and is helped further by the black strip around it. With black text on a grey screen, I’m surprised so many e-readers come in white, the black helps create an optical illusion that the grey background is whiter than it really is, making it more readable. True fact.
• B&N’s store has access to Google’s library of 1 million e-books, I’ve found some real gems that don’t even show up on the Google Books website. Getting these on a Kindle was a nightmare, well, not as easy.
• There is no rotate function, because:
• PDF reflow is awesome, you can scale up the fonts in any document (providing it has fonts), similar to the Sony Reader Touch.
• PDB files can be searched quicker and jumped about in faster than EPUBs.

The Nook has been a pleasant surprise, it has its flaws, which I’ll go into in my next post, but overall it’s a great device. Is it the world’s most advanced e-book reader? Probably not, especially when technology moves so fast. Is it the best e-book reader for me? Only time will tell.

I’d love to hear what my readers think about e-book readers, do you have one, would you buy another, what features do they need, or is there no point to them at all? Leave a comment below.

My wife has just given birth to our first child so can’t promise that I’ll be taking them along but I’m very much hoping to head along myself on Saturday.

Regards

Started one year ago, and held on alternative Friday mornings, the Open Coffee Lisburn branch has proven to be a huge success, drawing in techies, bloggers, entrepreneurs and more. Most importantly this random, free and open networking group has, for a lot of us, created real-world friendships.

The openness and social nature of Open Coffee, compared to the strict regimented structure of other business networking groups, such as BNI means that we can try different things. So on Saturday 16 January, we’ll be having our first Open Coffee Lisburn outside of Lisburn, in Banbridge. “On Tour” as I like to call it, we’ll be meeting at 9:30AM in Starbucks at The Outlet. With most attendees being married and with kids, we encourage you to bring the family along too, it’ll be a great social event.

If you’ve never been along to an Open Coffee meeting, this is the perfect opportunity to come along and meet the group.

You can contact us on twitter through http://twitter.com/oclisburn
The majority of us are on Google Wave and if you add me, I can invite you to the group – andrewgribben.com@googlewave.com
And finally, you can keep up with our events by subscribing to our iCal

Psalm 100:5 – For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

Happy New Year!

Many, many versions already exist around the web, but either have hideously formatted text or are far too unwieldy to fit into typical usage patterns for the Bible. Of course others have been working on this problem, Osnova has produced several Bibles and developed a jump to verse technique using the search function of the device. Type ge.1.10 and find and the reader will jump to the Genesis chapter 1 verse 10.

I’ve used a similar technique, by hiding a code for chapter using white coloured text (doesn’t show on the device but is still searchable) you can enter Gen.1, Matt.1 etc and the reader leaps to the correct chapter. As far as the reading experience goes, each verse flow into one another, with verse numbers showing in a smaller font.

Very soon I’ll have an Open Bible Project website up and running, hosting the scriptures and various reference books online. Each user of the website will be able to annotate, highlight and link text across books of the Bible and the reference library. This customised version of the Bible will be available (freely) as a download for use on your reader, bringing those highlights, notes and links with it.

Here’s the steps you’ll need to get started.

• First off it’s really handy if you have a spare computer which you leave running, so you get notifications when you’re out.
• You’ll need Growl for this to work
• Prowl for iPhone and the Prowl plugin
• In the Growl system prefs make sure that the default notification is set to Prowl
• Visit http://www.getwaveboard.com and download the installer and let it do it’s thing (Mac Only)
• Install and run Waveboard. At the moment it’s a wrapper for the website but with a few nice features added; hotkeys, status bar icon etc

What should happen is when you get a new wave, or an existing wave is updated, Waveboard will send the notification to Growl which in turn will Push out the Prowl app on your trusty iPhone and look like this:

Waveboard also offer an iPhone app which can be launched from the Prowl notification, it’s £0.59 and is’nt much more than a wrapper, although I’m sure it will improve over time, but I decided to stick with Google’s webapp version. Just browse over to http://wave.google.com, accept the warning that your browser isn’t supported and you should see webapp version of Wave. At this point you can add it as a bookmark to the homescreen, giving you a nice Wave icon and remove those browser controls. It’s flakey but it quite useable.

I’m not sure what will come from Wave, it could be the next Gmail, or the next Orkut, either way it’ll be an interesting journey.

It’s only one post for now, but I’m sure when she finds time out from looking after our 7 week old daughter, we’ll be hearing more from her.

Check it out – Coffee and Chocolate Cake

An awesome coffee, that I’m finding tastes amazing in the stovetop/moka pot! This “6 cup” Bialetti (from M&S Home) works great with 30g of ground coffee and you only want to produce about 2fl oz (about 2 espresso shots) worth of liquid; once the coffee starts up the spout take it off the heat and you’re sorted!

Calibre is a free, open source, cross-platform ebook management software. It’s like iTunes (the way it used to be) for books, but kinda uglier. Looks may not be it’s strong point, but it is great for managing your library, converting formats (DRM free of course), renaming books and meta information individually or en masse. One feature I hadn’t made use of, was it’s ability to generate a newspaper from an RSS feed. What surprised me even further was that on the DX, the newspaper displayed in the exact same way, with a section list etc, as the newspapers from Amazon. Very nice when the blog or news site you use doesn’t have and issue to buy on Amazon, even nicer when you’re in the UK and Amazon have blocked purchases from outside the US.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there, Calibre goes as far as to contain “recipes” which are used to scrape text from certain websites. Web page scraping might be a controversial feature, but if you want a newspaper created from BBC News or a your unread Google Reader articles, then there’s a recipe for that. It’s even possible to customise your recipe by adding new feeds, so my BBC Newspaper now contains a section for news in Northern Ireland just after the headlines. You can see how it turns out, below.

The Obel Tower is a building currently under construction in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Costing £85 million and measuring 80.5 metres (265 ft) in height, the tower when completed is set to dominate the Belfast skyline. It will overtake the current tallest skyscraper in Ireland, Windsor House (80 m), also in Belfast. Developed by the Karl Group, the Obel Tower is located on Donegall Quay on the River Lagan beside the Lagan Weir.

My brother, Mark, an architecture student at UUJ, recently got a look around inside, here are a few of his photos. Just look at how small the other buildings are and he wasn’t even at the top!