gdgt

I own and have used nook and Kindles. A big advantage of Kindle is highlights/notes. You can do them on nook, but there is no way to retrieve a list of highlights and notes. The only way you will ever see your note or highlight again is if you go Next page or Previous, page by page, and come to that page again. On Kindle (or Sony Readers) you can get a list of your highlights and notes, and Kindle even gives you a way to see them at your kindle.amazon.com page.

After holding the new Kindle for 5 seconds, I've dropped my original stance that the Nook is superior. The new Kindle makes the Nook feel like it's made of lead.

The Nook has two advantages going for it and depending upon your reading/purchasing habits it will sway your decision.

1. Adobe Digital Editions Support, which basically means Overdrive support through libraries. If you use your library now at all for books and want to checkout ebooks in the future, the Nook is the clear winner here.

2. ePub support. You can at the very least comparison shop on the Sony or Kobo (and ebooks.com) stores to load them on the Nook. If there is any DRM at all or ePub file formats then you cannot load them on the Kindle. You are shopping at the Amazon store only.

If you are fully vested in the Amazon ecosystem already though then why not go Kindle.

For Epub books, check out Project Gutenburg, a huge free stash of free, out of copyright books. Also check out the program Calibre, which canverts many ebook and word processor formats into the nook format, or whatever you like (and helps manage your elibrary.) It also converts the Amazon format, so I can use the superior Amazon store (with my PC) to source books for my nook. (Some Amazon files are copy-protected, but this can be hacked. I would never buy a book I couldn't archive wherever I wanted.)

BTW, the nook runs Android, so in theory it can be hacked to run Android apps, although I have not done this yet.

My first nook was defective, but the B&N store swapped it out in minutes. There is no Amazon (physical) store, and I avoid Target because they have given my wife a hard time about returning other stuff.

Just got a Nook. :) Very nice and has epub support (for those of you who borrow ebooks from libraries). I'm at B&N right now and enjoying the free library of books you can read while here (well at least for an hour a day in-store). I did notice it's not lightweight, but it's not heavy either. Worthy buy in my estimation. I stuck with wifi only version for $149. The whispersync would be nice- but I believe it will become available eventually with a firmware upgrade. I'm glad there are choices though, otherwise Kindle or Nook would not be at the price and at the level they are in. Oh and iPad too I imagine.

For what it is the Nook is intuitive once you've had it for about ten minutes. I thought the whole thing was color screen- no it's just the bottom small screen that is. Hope this helps! The deal breaker was epub- I like to check out books from the library and also the sharing of books with other Nook owners. That's cool and under-rated feature (I'll try it out).

Tony

I've never used a Nook, but I would like to point out Amazon will launch a new program to check out .mobi (Kindle format) books at local libraries all around the country sometime later this year. They've said 11,000 libraries to start in the press release. Of course, most libraries already lend .epub format books (compatible with Nook).

I think Amazon can dominate the e-reader market (they may be already, but they won't tell us how many they've sold!), the main problem so far has been that they are missing features like library lending, loaning books to friends, etc., but they are adding these features to better compete with more open-source readers.

I believe the Kindle will come out on top and be the best device to own in the coming years, so I bought a Kindle. However, there is the sort of monopolistic looming shadow of "if you own a Kindle, you can only buy books directly from amazon". That's not exactly true, but it's close. Plus, when you buy books from amazon, as far as I know, you don't own them, you have a license. If for some reason amazon doesn't like what you've been doing on their site, they can remove your account, taking all your books with it. All things to consider. I think the best thing to do is go to a store like Best Buy that has displays of both and get some hands on time with both, and choose the one that you like the most.

P.S. I was also considering the Kobo. I liked it when I tried it out, but it's extremely slow loading, turning pages, and connecting to wi-fi compared to the Kindle.