I did it all for the Nook...

Last week I bought myself a Barnes & Noble Nook, their version of an electronic reader. [Aside: I'm not sure how to spell it; often on their website B&N refers to it in all caps, shouting out their pleasure in their new device - "NOOK!" Other times they whisper, "nook." I think they prefer the uncapitalized version, but I have a tendency to prefer to use the initial cap, so as not to confuse it with any other nooks I might have in the area, say, if I were eating a Thomas' English muffin...]

I decided months ago that I wanted to get either a Kindle or a Nook before I go to the Cape this summer (I'm leaving tomorrow! I'll blog about it again.) Amazon.com's Kindle is similar; as far as I can tell, having never handled a Kindle, the only major difference is that the Kindle has a keyboard at the bottom and the Nook has a touchpad. Also, at the time, the Nook was $40 cheaper. Of course, today I got an email from Amazon.com indicating that the Kindle is now $139, or $10 less than I paid for the Nook. Whatever. Once I had decided to get it, I could hop in the car and drive for 10 minutes to get to the nearest Barnes & Noble and be home less than an hour later with the new device in my hand, rather than waiting several days for Amazon.com to ship it to me. So the Nook won.

I think the name is a little cutesy, though. "Nook"? Really? It makes it all cozy, a place to curl up with a good book, which was probably at least part of the intention. It also lends itself to all sorts of risqué humor. "I'm going to bed now with my Nook." That could be my new pick-up line: "Hi, handsome, want to play with my Nook?" And there's the limp hit by Limp Bizkit that I paraphrased for the title, "I did it all for the nookie." I've got a Nook and I know how to use it...

The first book I bought for my new Nook was "Catching Fire", by Suzanne Collins. This is marketed as a young-adult book, the continuation of "The Hunger Games", which I had just finished the week before. I had been waiting until it came out in paperback, which it did at the beginning of this month. Getting the second volume on the Nook meant I didn't have to wait another year for it to come out in paperback. Plus, the third and I think final volume of this continuing story, "Mockingjay", comes out next month. As soon as I can download it, I'll buy it. This is a post-apocalyptic dystopian series, the sort of thing I love. I can't wait to find out how it ends. [another aside: I caught a quick glance of one of the girls at fat camp reading "The Hunger Games" on the second episode of "Huge".]

The plus side to reading a Nook instead of a book? When I put it down without a bookmark, the pages don't all riffle shut, making it difficult to find my place. When I open the Nook again, it comes up at the page where I left off.

The minus side? It's an appliance, not a book. The second book I read on the Nook was "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" by Stieg Larsson, over 500 pages long. The battery died at some point when I was at work without the charger. (I was showing it to a friend. Me, read at work?) If I had the book, I wouldn't have to worry about batteries! Of course, it'd be in hardcover and difficult to hold and store, not to mention expensive. (Not as expensive as the Nook, but whatever.)

And that's another advantage to electronic readers: storage space. I read constantly, and I want to keep a lot of the books I read so that I can enjoy them again. All my bookcases are full, and I've stopped buying hardcovers because I just don't have room for them. Even larger-format paperbacks are difficult to store.

Theoretically, I can store 1500 books on my Nook. I believe that, should I go over that, I can move some books to a server on the Barnes & Noble website. They'd still be my books, just not on my Nook.

So I've got several new books for my vacation, and I didn't have to wait for them to come out in paperback before I could buy them! I've got the first volume of Robin Hobb's new Rain Wilds series, "Dragon Keeper." I loved her earlier Rain Wilds trilogy, and I can't wait to start reading it! I've got "The Forgotten Garden" by Kate Morton, and I've got "Garden Spells" by Sarah Addison Allen. Neither of these are gardening books; the first is a novel set in Australia, and the second is a magical story about two sisters, set in North Carolina. Plus I downloaded a few free classics, including "Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen (to go with "Pride and Prejudice", which was on the Nook when I got it). All of these stored on a machine about the size of a slim paperback, and plenty of space for more.