Would I recommend NOOK for reading non-fiction materials?

I am grateful for receiving a color NOOK for Christmas and to avoid writing a review of a device with superficial experience, like many reviewers, I have decided to hold off writing a review of this device until I have adequate usage of it. Now more than 6 months of usage reading many technical eBooks I believe I have enough experience to write a review.

This review is from the usage and perspective of a reader of technical materials. Reading technical materials is very different from reading a novel and hence it is important if you are thinking of getting one of these devices, either NOOK or other similar device, make sure you have a good idea of what kind of materials you will be reading. Try it out with a DRM-free technical book.

If you are planning to use it to read technical materials, I will definitely not recommend you to buy a NOOK (color or not) for the reasons I list below. As a previous owner and long time user of a Fujitsu Tablet, I am no strange to this kind of keyboard-less device.

With no apology to Barnes & Nobles, I have not bought one single B&N DRM controlled eBooks for obvious reasons and probably never will. I bought all my DRM-free watermarked eBooks from InformIT, which is a great site for technical eBooks because you can get both ePub and PDF format for the one price; I can put the ePub version in my NOOK and the PDF version in my notebook. That's the wonderful benefit of using DRM-free books. This allows me to test the NOOK and to find which format is the best.

Here are the reasons why I believe a NOOK is a unsuitable reader to handle technical materials:
1) The extremely primitive and incapable user-interface is one of the root cause of problems elaborated below. It makes a mockery of having large storage capability allowing one to carry many books with you when the interface is so primitive that you cannot open several books at the same time, like you would with a physical books on your desk, and returning to the page you left off. This is a severe and fundamental oversight in the design.

In reading a novel, you will not never be reading several at the same time darting from one to another. Hence the ultra primitive user-interface is adequate for that purpose but is totally inadequate for anything else. It is a joy to use my PDF XChange-Viewer to read the PDF format of those eBook on my notebook.  

2) Even overlooking the problem mentioned in 1) above and reading just one book (ePub format) is also very frustrating. There is few technical book not containing notes (endnotes, footnotes, or bibliography) and all have provided hyperlinks to them. While it is so convenient to press the hyperlink to jump to the destination, you only have a few seconds of window of opportunity to jump back to where you came from. This is because the back button on the top middle of the screen disappears after several seconds. The time it is allowed to stay around is not even configurable but there is a setting to enable animate page turning.

Surely the developer of this device is not serious and placing animation ahead of functionality. Once that back button disappears, you have no way of bring it back. Returning to where you came from is a major hurdle. I often keeps a piece of scrap paper with my NOOK for jolting the page number.

3) Following on from 2), one wonders why someone would prefer to provide a slider bar to go to the required page when an edit box will be more functional particularly these touch device is so imprecise to allow one to move one page either way. Unless you remember the page number when you press that hyperlink, you will have a hard time finding your way back. As a result, it is a very frustrating device to use. I do not have such issue when reading the PDF on my PC as I can jump to a particular page by entering it into the text box.

It is definitely a sad case of cuteness trumping over functionality.

4) Its ePub reader cannot magnify diagrams at will and this is not only annoying but downright dysfunctional when reading technical materials full of diagrams and charts. Its PDF viewer can magnify but its ePub reader cannot.

5) Because it cannot retain your place in several books, it is very frustrating when using the NOOK as a device to replace physical books. You can do this comfortably on a notebook but not on NOOK.

I definitely will not recommend anyone to buy a NOOK to read technical materials.

Borders' demise - sad - what'll happen to those DRM eBooks?

When a bookshop of this size filed for Chapter 11, it is always a sad affair not only the disappearance of a place for browsing books but also for those staff that work there.

I can see those shops in Australia closing because it is just not as competitive as buying from Amazon, even including paying for postage and handling fee. This is also true even way before Australian dollar reaching parity with the USD. Furthermore, the technical books in those shops are old and are there only as a token gesture. The best part of a bookshop is for browsing and flicking through pages that often stirring up the impulsive buying. If there aren't any new materials why visit them?

I am more interested to know what will happen to those customers' DRM controlled eBooks managed by Borders if it finally closes down? Perhaps this is a warning to these operators - Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and others that use DRM - you, the bookshop, won't be there forever and my copy of "Gone With the Wind" physical book is there independent of the existence of the shop/enterprise that sold me the copy. They are actually paid for in full by your customer identical to a physical item. It is not yours!

I do not totally subscribe to the theory that eBook kills Borders

"Electronic book publishing is going to destroy the major chains. The sort of high volume disposable fiction which is their stock in trade, will migrate almost entirely into electronic form over the next 10 years."

There are regular reports that eBook costs more than their hard cover version. Move over, having used a NOOK for several months for reading non-DRM controlled technical eBooks. I can tell you that it is a real struggle to use those eBook readers when one needs to constantly flick between several of those books; they can't handle managing several opened books remembering their locations, etc. Reading a novel is fine but using them for technical research or investigation, give me a stack of physical books anytime or running them on a PC/Notebook.

New report shows file-sharing does not harm music industry at least in Canada

It is good for everybody, industry or music lovers, to see this kind of studies. It can only be good for those open-minded people. A recently released report by University of London for Industry Canada studies the impact of file sharing on the music industries.

Of course, there are always people who refutes this with no publication of solid data. That's human nature. In this world, it is either put up or shut up. Comments like this:

It's not rocket science to work out that if you get your music for free, why would you go out and buy it.

I have also reported else where musician's view towards this issue and they have not found that file-sharing tracks is hurting their income as their income does not derive from CD sales. Rather, their main source of income is from concerts and live performance. This kind of music sharing can be good for their as kind of advertising.

Many predicts the introduction of eBook, electronic libraries, such as 24X7 and O'Reilly Library, and the Internet spells the death knell for physical books - why would anyone want to buy a physical book when one could read it mostly free? The same argument as presented above. It is interesting to know that sales figures released and available on Google have disappointed these doom-sayers and the contrary actually has happened.

It is an interesting finding:

In the aggregate, we are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P filesharing and CD purchases in Canada. The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.
[...]
However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing.
[...]
we find some indirect evidence that price influences CD purchasing, as the variable capturing the motivation to engage in P2P file-sharing because of the perception that CDs were too costly was negatively associated with CD purchases.

DRM - never works and a DRM-Free world is being herald in.

DRM is one of those misguided attempts to prevent piracy, developed based on mythical and unsound assumptions, and ending up hurting the consumers. This article refuted many myths propagated by these Music Industries and DRM vendors.

In the article, according to EFF's

In fact, argues Schultz, DRM drives some would-be paying customers to the music black market, because, to date, it's the only place where you can obtain music downloads that you can use without constraints.

A myth that is often used to justify the use of DRM is that the artists being ripped off by these file-sharers. According to this article:

Recording artists won't necessarily suffer in a no-DRM world. These are the struggling musicians who supposedly would be playing their guitars for tips in the subway, in the doomsday scenario, if music were distributed DRM-free. For them, however, the move to a DRM-free world is either good news or irrelevant. It may mean fewer sales for the top moneymakers, but the majority of recordings—85 percent according to the RIAA—don't generate enough revenue to cover their costs.

According to Todd Rundgren, a recording artist

is that artists don't see money from their recordings; we capitalize on music we have recorded by going out and performing live. It is actually more worthwhile to give your music away—and make it up in terms of ticket sales.

[...]

If it takes me a year to sell a million records and I made $1 million in royalties from that, I'd make that much in a week or so if I toured

The recent appearance of sites like http://www.gbox.com selling DRM-free music is a welcoming sign.