The doorbell has never brought this much joy! I ran downstairs and grabbed it up like my life depended on it. My brand new Kindle Touch!!! I had been waiting for this for weeks!

I haven’t had a lot of playtime since it landed on my doorstep, but I have noticed 2 things thus far:

One: The touch screen isn’t the most sensitive or sensible; I’ve had to touch a few times to get it to respond and a couple of times, it seems as if the gestures had been queued and ended up registering as two gesture instead of one. There is no indication when the display is frozen and waiting to process input.

Two: the on-screen keyboard leaves artifacts once the keyboard goes away. A faint image of the on-screen keyboard remains on screen even after dismissing it. This could be annoying as you get to the bottom of the page while reading.

Other than that – I am as happy as a pig in shit!

Photos follow:

that's going to get annoying

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I blogged about my visit to the Bell County Museum last week but what I didn’t mention was that on the way back home, as pained up as I was, I had to make a stop at the Barnes and Noble to see if they had received their demo Nook.

I walked in, took my customary deep breath at the door (just because I SO love the smell of the place) and made a beeline for the Customer Service desk. As luck would have it, there was an empty stand on one corner of the desk for the nook – obviously fairly recently occupied by a nook, but now looking quite lonely. I stood around looking sorry for myself before I noticed that there were actually TWO such stands, one that I had strode right past without noticing that it was occupied.

Let me warn you now, I took no pictures simply because in the space of about 15 minutes of playing with the nook, I had no less than 4 employees walk by asking me if I needed anything. The last thing I wanted was to have to explain to them not only why I was still standing at the desk fiddling with the thing, but why I was also snapping photos of it. I abhor confrontation, and I didn’t need to be dispatched from the store on my behind.

Needless to say, I took a moment to LOOK at it. Memorize what it looked like because I knew I wasn’t going to be seeing it again anytime soon. It looked smaller than the Kindle to me – smaller in terms of width and height. The separate screens are obvious as you look at it – the top screen larger than the bottom, but clearly not as large as the Kindle’s reading screen as was pointed out to me in the comments, the reading screen is actually the same size as the Kindle’s. That told me there would be less text on screen per “page”. The photo that was on screen being displayed as the screen saver was quite eye-catching too – picture of a castle-like structure with very noticeable turrets and a tree in the foreground.

When I picked it up, immediately I realized that it is not only thicker than the Kindle, but heavier. Not heavier by much, but definitely noticeable. The reviews were correct in that for people with small hands, such as myself (and those who also tend to have joint aches), holding the nook one-handed would be a slight challenge over a long period of time.

The buttons are far less complicated – 2 on the left, 2 on the right – for forward or backward navigation. The center “n” icon for the nook is like a menu button. Once pressed it displays the top-level nook menu “the daily, my library, shop, reading now, and settings” in the color screen at the bottom of the device.

Now I have to tell you that I instantly saw what people have been complaining about most: it is slow as all heck. I touched the “my library” menu option and sat there for a few seconds, before pressing again, and again, and again, and again … before something finally happened, and when it did, it happened in a big way. Of course, the touches are “queued” so all the repeat touches queued up to give me a mess of actions once the device actually responded in the first place.

No matter, unlike my usual ability to crash just about any device that is handed to me, it stayed on and functioning and I could press the little “n” symbol and get back to the main menu and try again.

When I finally got the “tour” open (it was the only book on the in-store nook to sample), it took a few minutes to draw the page “Please wait while we format the page for you” – a very polite message explaining the delay in seeing the text, but no less annoying.

The good news is that the navigation buttons are quite easy to click. On the Kindle, I have to sometimes press a little harder than normal to push the button down. On the nook, the next and previous buttons are recessed so pressing them accidentally is assumedly not going to be as easy as it was with the Kindle 1.

As I blogged once before, 2 features of the nook entice me:

1. WiFi capabilities make it easy to use just about anywhere without the restrictions of the cell network.
2. The ability to lend a book to a friend. As with anything of that nature, it is restricted to lending one book to someone else just once and for only 2 weeks in duration. The good part of it is that it doesn’t matter what reading device the other person has – a computer, pda, kindle, iphone – the book can be loaned in PDF format and hence readable on just about anything else.
Additionally, however, while in-store, playing around with the nook, I discovered a third feature that makes me even more want to run out and get one right now:
3. The ability to completely customize how my page looks – I can change font, font size, orientation …

It was while I was playing around with the customizing functions that I had my 4th visit from customer service personnel and realized that chances are I was beginning to look a little odd standing there playing with the nook for the past 10 – 15 minutes or so. It was probably best to put it down and make my way slowly away from the counter so that they wouldn’t call security (and they might have already done so and I wouldn’t have been aware so engrossed I was in the nook).

Reading today that there may be a firmware (software?) upgrade for the nook scheduled for later this week makes me think “hmm, I may just have to pay another visit to see if the update does anything snazzy”. Regardless of how it seems inferior to the Kindle 2 at this point in time, I am determined that at some point in the near future, I will indeed be investing in a nook of my own. It might actually be prudent to wait and see whether a year from now a nook 2 (new and improved?) becomes available and wait until then.

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It’s been a-buzz in the air for a few weeks (months?) – Barnes and Noble’s answer to the Kindle.  I’ve been ignoring the chatter for the most part because, being unemployed at this point makes it impossible for me to grab hold of new techie toys and play with them the way I normally would have wanted to do. However, the Nook (as it is now known) is set to be released in November, on trial at a B&N near you, and as enticing as a well-built man in bikini trunks. Ok, ok – maybe not THAT enticing.

As you all may already know, I am a Kindle owner. My Kindle sleeps beside me at nights – hubby on one side of the bed, Kindle on the bedside table on other side. It goes pretty much everywhere with me. I have over 500 books on it and every now and then, I will set aside everything else that is happening and go read a book. For instance, last night, I think I finally shut the light off at near 3am because I was up reading One for the Money (Stephanie Plum, No. 1) by Janet Evanovich. As I may have mentioned before, I was always a paper and binding kind of bookworm – I had to feel and smell the books to get the full reading experience. Reading isn’t only about reading the words and understanding for me, it’s the entire experience of reading that gets me. If I didn’t have trouble controlling my spending urges, I would spend far more time in Barnes and Noble book stores than I currently do – simply because the smell of the place, the quiet, the sight of people just reading right where they are – seated on the store floor – is just part and parcel of the reading experience.

I shall never forget the Dallas experience: 3 colleagues and myself were in Dallas on a training exercise for 3 weeks in December of 2006. One Saturday, they wanted to go to the mall and shop. I am not one for shopping; when I need stuff, I go shopping, get what I need and leave. This kind of shopping has always tired and bored me. Luckily, the mall where they chose to go had a Barnes & Noble – right at the door where we parked. So I happily told them I’d wait while they shopped in B&N. Of course, they were stymied – what was I going to do when I was done in B&N because they weren’t likely to be done in the next few minutes. I smiled and told them that if it took them 3 hours, they’d come back and find me seated right here on the floor in almost the same position they left me in. They laughed, left the car keys with me because they were sure I would want to go sit in the car, and said they’d check on me in an hour or 2.

Long story short, 3 hours later, they all were done and came to find me … and there I was, seated on the floor in front of the same shelf they left me in front of, with a pile of books around me – reading. This is the kind of reader I am. The smell of the store, the sound of pages turning, silence of people reading all around me …. that was my heaven.

The Kindle managed to merge 2 of my loves – technology and reading. I don’t get the whole experience with the kindle, but I get enough that I could literally give up my book addiction. And for some reason, I stopped going to B&N. It’s because, I think, that I associated being in the store with leaving with a bag full of books. I felt odd to walk into a B&N with a Kindle, sit and read it and then walk out.

So, the Nook opens up endless possibilities for me – and I have a date with my neared B&N to go and check out the Nook and dream. Of all the features of the Nook, the 2 that struck me most stunningly is the ability to lend books to friends AND it’s WiFi capabilities.  Oh yes, this could be the start of a great thing for B&N.

I’m sorry Kindle … sometimes it’s not so good to be first.

And I promise you, dear readers, as soon as I am done with my date with a Nook, I shall impart my impressions right here for you.

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My best friend gifted me a Kindle 1 just before the Kindle 2 was released in early 2009 and I have to say that next to the extended Lord of The Rings DVD set, that just might be the best gift a friend has ever given me. That my Kindle is now the 2nd most important piece of technology I own is a revolution of sorts since I traditionally have been a “real book” reader before now. I have tried reading electronic versions of books on my computer, my cellphone and on both of the PDAs that I once had and not one of those mediums were a satisfactory substitute for my love of the FEEL of books. Enter the Kindle – and it was enough for me to literally get rid of most of my “real books” and get electronic versions of most of them.

I have been a big reader from the age of 6 when one afternoon, after bugging my mother once too often, she pointed towards one of the very laden bookshelves my parents own and told me to find something to read. Being that Shakespeare, Michael Manley and the like were beyond my 6 year old mind, I found and fixed on a book by Carolyn Keene; The Quest of the Missing Map – a Nancy Drew Mystery. My mother likes to finish this story with the sentence “I haven’t heard a peep out of her since” which isn’t far from the truth – after that day, the first place to look for me would be on my bed with my nose buried in some book or other. I still hear echoes of my father’s voice yelling at me to not lie down and read “It’ll spoil your eyes!”

Soon as I could write legibly, I realized that I liked to write also. I had books upon books of my writing. Most were stream of conscious dumps or just plain idle writings with little or no imagination or construct about it … but I dreamed of writing novels like Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew mysteries and later on when I discovered Stephen King, horror stories to curl the toes of the most brave of souls. I will even admit to starting stories that friends have told me have promise, yet never have I managed to complete one. The process usually is: I start writing, hit a block, re-read what I’ve written and find it wanting, finally abandon the whole idea.

Lately, I have been craving the opportunity to use my love of reading and writing and make a career out of them. And when I say career, I don’t mean a media mogul with offices in 10 cities around the world. No, I mean a job I love that I can probably work a schedule of my own around, earn some cash and expand my experience and skills while I am at it. Which in itself is odd, considering that my training and work experience up until now has been in Information Technology. I choose to see that as a plus, however. Knowing as much as I do about computers – what they can do, how they can break – I am sure I will be able to bypass that usual hurdle and hit the ground running writing and reading.

Enter my best friend and her suggestion that I re-read Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”. After only a chapter or 2, I realize that to be successful at writing, I must practice and put myself out there to be seen. Forget how bad I think it is, pat myself on the back when I complete something, put it out there for others to see, allow them to criticize (constructively as well as destructively), take the advice at face value and re-assess my work and get back in the ring and try again.

As with almost everything in life, it is a work in progress.

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