Kindle Review – Kindle 3 Review, iPad Review

Lots of interesting snippets about Nook, Kindle, Sony and eReaders.

First, here’s a good indie author in the Kindle Store with a 1 cent book – The Kiribati Test by Stacey Cochran. It’s published by Sam Landstrom.

Nook, Kindle News.

1. GigaOm picks Amazon as one of his Fabulous 5 companies for 2010 and predicts that the Kindle will kill most of the other eReaders.
2. GigaOm also covers the fact that Luidia, a company that creates eBeam interactive whiteboards, is now including a ‘Send to Kindle’ feature which supports Kindle 2, DX. 
3. Nook reviews are hammering it for slowness - a new mis-feature is that the Nook formats a book for display every time it opens it and this takes 15 seconds or so.
4. There are rumors that one firmware update for the Nook has already gone out to fix this. Will update if this gets confirmed.
5. Nook owners who were supposed to get their Nooks on the 7th of December originally now are in line to get them Dec 16th. First wave customers (Nov 30th date) will be getting them today and tomorrow. 

First Few Nook Hands-on Experiences

These are just people trying out the Nook briefly in stores.

1. One person tried out a Nook in store and thought the Nook software needed a few more builds. He said the lag made him feel like his touch wasn’t registering.  
2. Another reviewer complains about lag on touchscreen and in page turns.
3. Quite a few other people also mentioned slower page turns (one said its slowed than on the Kindle). That certainly indicates a huge problem with the OS implementation or the use of a weak processor. Its the same screen – there’s no reason page turns should be slower.
4. A very good UI design idea from one user - keep things on the LCD i.e. use eInk only for reading and everything else on the LCD.

The general consensus seems to be – It’s OK, they better fix the lag.

The line of the day -

my consensus is, if you’ve pre-ordered, you’re basically going to get a great piece of hardware with a beta-level [slightly unfinished] piece of software.

Most of these were very brief encounters. However, they seem to match the tech blog reviews i.e. lots of promise and poor execution.

Reader Store – new name for Sony’s eBook Store.

Sony moves over completely to ePub and adds Windows 7 and Snow Leopard support for its eReader software -

1. December 11th (this Friday) sees a renaming of the Sony eBook Store to Reader Store. 
2. Complete shift to ePub. Any new purchases or downloads of past purchases will be in ePub. Smart move by Sony.  
3. Reader Library Software Version 3.1 comes out on the 11th too – It supports Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. It also supports the Sony Reader Daily Edition. 

eBooks and eReaders

1. Teleread lists the 5 top free original books from Smashwords. Well worth looking at.  
2. Pixel Qi say their first production batch is almost done and will go into specialized tablet devices with multi-touch. Time until Apple Tablet rumors start: 27 minutes.
3. Pixel Qi also promise to tell us what they will be showing off at CES 2010.