My Comparison of Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color vs. the Amazon Kindle 3G

"I love this book by Duane. I wonder if he's single."

I’ve owned a 3G Kindle for a few months now, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. However, being the tech junkie that I am, when I heard that Barnes & Noble was coming out with a color e-reader, the Nook, I took a quick look at it and then decided it was something I was willing to try out.

I blogged about my problems with buying it in the first place, specifically the dork who worked at Barnes & Noble who told me it could hook up to my computer and transfer my books that way (because I don’t have a wifi connection at home). Turns out he was full of crap, so I have to actually go to a place with wifi in order to download any of the purchases I make. Not a big deal, but a bit annoying when you were planning otherwise.

Right off the start, I have to say that the Nook looks really nice, especially in color. That, however, does bring a couple of deficiencies as well, specifically a very long download time, whereas the Kindle downloads almost instantaneously. Not a huge deal, but somewhat inconvenient. I’m sure if the Kindle had a color version, I’d be going through the same problems, although I have yet to try with a grayscale book on the Nook to see if that’s much faster.

The Nook is a lot heavier than the Kindle. Kind of inconvenient if you’re holding it up for a long time. Never really thought about that until I actually had to do it.

The biggest difference is in choice of content, and I’m really hoping that changes soon. The Kindle has so many choices of things to buy and download. When I bought the Nook, I was looking forward to all sorts of color books and magazines, but their selection is sparse, if almost devoid of content. There are so few magazines who have signed up with the Nook that I find myself really stretching myself to find something I actually want to download. But I wanted to at least see one, so I went with Consumer Reports, which costs $2.40 a month. It’s not bad, but to be honest, I’d never have bought it if it wasn’t the only choice of some content that I wanted to look at. That’s not a good sign when it comes to buying magazines.

My hope is that because the Nook Color is so new that more magazines are right around the corner thinking about signing up. But so far, on the “Coming Soon” list with Barnes & Noble’s Nook content, I don’t see any magazines planning a future launch. If that doesn’t change, the Nook is a doomed product.

So far, there are a few children’s titles that are in color, so if you have kids, it might be a decent purchase, if not a bit expensive. But there just aren’t enough. My hope, again, is that because it is so new that so few publishers have been pushing content to it, but are planning to do so in the future. If not, again, the Nook is doomed.

Price: The price of the Nook Color was $249. With a cover and tax, it cost me about $300. That’s a bit on the high side for me, even though I was willing to pay it just for the convenience of trying it out. Yeah, I’m kind of stupid that way. But if there is not more content released, I just bought a $300 paper weight, and that will piss me off.

The Kindle 3G is $189, and while there is a wifi version for $139, I had to buy the more expensive one because I don’t have wifi at home. For the extra $50, it was worth it. And the amount of content is wonderful. I subscribe to the Washington Post for $14.99 a month (think that’s the price), and it’s definitely worth it to receive the newspaper each and every morning. I had trouble finding this newspaper on the Nook, but others, like the New York Times are on it. Again, the selection was abysmal at best.

Break down:

Barnes & Noble Nook Color (positives)

It’s in color.

There is some unique content (through Barnes & Noble’s PubIt! program, which is a lot like Amazon’s self-publishing for the Kindle).

That’s about it.

This one goes to 11

Nook (negatives)

Heavy

Expensive ($249)

Not a lot of content available for it.

Battery life is pretty low in comparsion to the Kindle (massively low). A charge seems to last about 8-10 hours, according to their documentation. The Kindle lasts all week long and that’s with a lot of use. Again, that might have something to do with the color.

Downloads take a long time.

Kindle (positives)

Fast downloads.

Lots of content. LOTS of content.

Price is $139 (for wifi version) and $189 for (3G/Wifi version)

Lighter than the Nook.

Battery lasts a long time.

"It was the best of times...it was the worst of times...(line?)"

Kindle (negatives)

Not in color. That’s really about it.

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A final note is that even though I’ve said mostly bad things about the Nook, if they can get past the problem of lack of content, it can become a powerhouse in e-readers. Customers at Barnes & Noble appeared really interested in the product, and a friend of mine keeps talking great about it. But without increased content, especially content that uses color, it will fail horribly.

One area where it could shine, and is almost untouched, is graphic novels. If comic book companies would realize that they now have a way to present their work on an e-reader, and embrace the Nook, both could do a wonderful job in selling this to the most desirable market out there, the teenager/young adult market. But I’m fearing that Barnes & Noble has handled the e-reader in almost the same way Blockbuster handled online movie distribution against Netflix. It is doing too little too late. As long as Barnes & Noble continues to appear to always be one step behind Amazon, they’re going to fail horribly as a book company, which is a whole other issue itself. But it’s in online content and e-readers where the final battle for dominance is going to take place. If someone could go back and tell Blockbuster to embrace the mail market when it didn’t, it could have changed things so much against Netflix. That’s where we are with the e-reader market. Barnes & Noble has a chance to push ahead and dominate. But history tells me that the results will be so much different.

If we choose the wrong e-reader, North Korea wins!