It finally happened, only a month or so after its release my local Barnes & Noble received a Nook of its very own to put on display and have people handle, caress, heavily pet, pucker up to and totally smooch (okay, okay, a smiling ultra-hip be-spectacled employee stopped me before getting to second base, but I was leading...). Actually, it wasn't love at first sight, but I was quite impressed, so much so that I couldn't just walk straight up to it but had to sidle in from the side, sneaking up on it through a stand of calendars and other bookish nick-nacks. The design of the Nook is elegant and although the screen was gray-scale (not a warm buttery beige-scale like the pages of a book) it had an impressive clarity and an amazing lack of glare. You could hold it at any angle and the flourescent tubes buzzing overhead wouldn't wash out the text. Unfortunately, to get to this point you first needed to pick up the Nook. Strike One! The nook is heavy. It's not a brick, but I found it to weigh about as much as a 400 page hardcover. Granted I don't exactly have crystal wrists, but for a few hundred dollars I expect something a bit lighter, something I can effortlessly hold over my head and read while laying down. At this price it should have little humming anti-grav pods on its sides to float in front of my face. Possibly more annoying than the actual weight of the device is the nagging notion that the Nook doesn't need to weigh this much. These days we can stuff eight gigs of memory onto a wafer thin mint. We have lithium batteries in cellphones that are so light they float (metaphorically – please don't take my word for this). I couldn't help but feel as if B&N intentionally made the Nook heavier to make it feel more impressive when picked up. Too bad I wasn't looking to buy a paper weight. Then I read a bit of Dracula off the Nook. It only took about four minutes to go from picking up the device to reading a page (keep in mind it also takes me about six minutes of wrestling and stuggling to unclasp a bra in the dark) But where the nook really lost points was in the turning of the pages. It takes nearly three seconds to go from page to page, and when it does so the screen flashes an annoying black and then splats out a static of pixels which crudely resolves into the next page of text. Flipping pages on the Nook is about as elegant as driving around the Mall parking lot, cruising for speed bumps. Strike Two! Finally, back to the interface which the young bespectacled booth attendant assured me was easy to figure out (I dry-humped the booth while he fiddled with it) for the life of me I couldn't find a way to get to something to read which hadn't first come through B&N's online store. No big surprise there but promises are promises, and this one means a lot to aspiring authors who are hoping to circumvent the big publishing conglomerates. This should be a ball but.... Strike Three! Ya Outta Here! With a slightly deflated hmmm, I put the Nook back in its nook and walked off. To be fair I decided to pick up a paperback and be just as critical to it. I don't remember the title or author, but the paperback was about 350 pages long and weighed about half as much as the nook. The cost was considerably better. It was much easier to access. The pages turned better. But. And I never thought I would admit this, but the Nook had a better page. Although the Nook lacks a warm beige page, the text is clearer and you don't get as many of the small annoyances that comes with a book. Books tend to cast shadows over themselves with angular light (does the Nook have an internal reading light? I didn't check). Then there is the bend at the spine of the book which causes the image of the words to distort. Little piddly things to be sure, but I have to admit that they do stand out after reading the Nook for a bit. So in the end? Close but no cigar. The eBook reader is something the world of publishing wants us to have far more than we want it. For publishers the profit gains of electronic publishing over paper publishing are so stunning that they will stop at nothing to get us to accept it - which isn't exactly the worst thing in the world, especially if you happen to be a tree. What I forsee is a system where people regularly buy cheap eBooks just to try them out and then buy the paper edition, if they truly love the book and want something to keep on a bookshelf (which is what I do with most library books, hmmm). For the publishers this will be something like a double sale, and for readers it means an escape from having too many books lying about the house that were never worth buying in the first place. But the Nook isn't it, and niether is the Amazon Kindle or the Sony eBook Reader. In the near future I think the eBook reader will morph into the Tablet PC – basically an ultralight netbook with no keyboard or mousepad. Not only will it read eBooks but it will also read eComicBooks (in full color) and probably play video games and watch movies and browse the web and do all those things which your home computer can do but in a lighter package. Which begs the question, will people actually do any reading on such a device? | 
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