Nook and Overdrive Confirmed!

On the subject of ereaders I have been something of a luddite.  I like my dead tree books, darn it.  I like the smell.  I like turning pages.  And I like that I can pick one up for under $4 at my favorite used bookstore, which is a far cry from $9.99 for the digital copies that many retailers are selling.  I didn’t like Kindle because of its proprietary format and being limited to shopping only at Amazon.  I didn’t like Sony because–well I forget why I didn’t like Sony other than the fact that their reader is very expensive, their ebookstore is also very expensive, and my CP, who got one, has some complicated series of steps to follow in order to convert books to be read on it.

Despite my lack of ereader and lack of intention of getting one for a long while, I’ve accrued a decent collection of free ebooks over the year.  A lot of stuff from Sony, freebies from various author’s sites.  Naturally, I haven’t touched most of them because I don’t have much time to actually read at my computer (nor do I really want to).  But they’re there for the day I succumb.

In October I had the bright idea, after reading somewhere that some ereaders would allow you to highlight and take notes on PDFs, that my boss would benefit from an ereader to keep track of all of her articles for work (which she is constantly losing the paper copy of).  So I started researching readers.  This was right around the time that Nook was being released.  And despite my determined clinging to my love of dead tree books, my interest was caught.  Nook covered multiformat, allows you to take notes and highlight, and actually read the format that ebooks from the library are in.  Except that for MONTHS no one has been able to say one way or the other.  It looked like it SHOULD.  But Barnes and Noble was saying No on the forums.  Then some Adobe folks said yes.  It was a big, very unclear mishmosh of information.

But this morning, I finally saw posts on the forums about people who had Nooks in their hot little hands who had successfully transferred ebooks from Overdrive!  Woot!  And that’s the deciding factor for me.  The ability to use the library’s ebooks with a reader.  At $259, Nook is a cheaper alternative to Sony (the only other reader I am aware of that works with library ebooks) and a solid competitor with Kindle.  It doesn’t come with a cover, from what I’ve read, so you have to factor in that cost as well (most decent ones seem to be in the $30+ range).  But it’s what I think I want to give myself for Christmas or birthday (as the next expected ship date is not until February 1st, which is into my birthday month).

Hubby is all surprised, given my attitude about real paper books.  But there’s a big appeal to having multiple books in one place, and the very real reality of the fact that I seriously am out of shelf space in our house.  I certainly won’t give up regular books, but I admit to being caught by the new and shiny promise of Nook.

Pot has bought me a year long membership to Fictionwise’s Buywise club for Christmas as a means to welcome me to the Dark Side.  I think I’ll have to work on a new book budget for 2010…

2 thoughts on “Nook and Overdrive Confirmed!

  1. You will be pleasantly surprised by the reading experience and flexibility of the Nook. The e-ink technology is wonderfully easy on the eyes. Additionally, I usually read 2-3 books at a time (fiction, business, teaching) and the ability to use the university library, public library and pdf conversions is an astronomical plus to ownership. I am a very satisfied Nook owner.

  2. I’m conflictingly hoping for a Nook myself. On one hand, I like *real* books–I am a shameless book abuser, creasing the pages and cracking the spine to make them mine…but on the other hand I am the voracious reader of just about everything from the back of a cereal box to my doorstop sized tome entitled “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”, so one little handy piece of electronics would simplify things a bit.

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