{"id":3628,"date":"2010-02-10T21:44:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T05:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/?p=3628"},"modified":"2010-02-10T21:44:27","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T05:44:27","slug":"barnes-noble-nook-is-a-dreadful-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2010\/02\/10\/barnes-noble-nook-is-a-dreadful-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Barnes & Noble Nook is a Dreadful Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’ve been so waiting with my bated breath and all for this magical Nook<\/em> machine from Barnes & Noble<\/em>.\u00a0 I was in a right dither tonight about an hour and a half ago as I shoved my reading glasses into my pocket, put my regular glasses on my face and piled into my car for the short ride to my nearest Barnes & Noble bookseller.\u00a0 But I stopped first at the Lenscrafters to run in and have them adjust my frames because my glasses are so new and have been drifting over lopsided all week.\u00a0 So the woman there fixed them up nicely and shined them good.\u00a0 Then I drove on toward my Nook encounter.<\/p>\n

The store had a lone unit attached to an anti-theft device that scared the hell out of me because I tend to demonstrate new devices to myself until nearby customers think I’m a lunatic and I certainly didn’t want to raise any alarms.\u00a0 The Nook said, ‘Press the Power Button to Wake Up.’\u00a0 I spun the device around several times until I located said button embedded in the upper edge of the Nook.\u00a0 I pressed it.<\/p>\n

I waited.<\/p>\n

Then I pressed it perhaps fourteen or fifteen times to try and make something wake up.\u00a0 Then the screen went through a series of blinks, flashes and some rather frightening symbols appeared and then disappeared.\u00a0 And then the machine said, ‘Press the Power Button to Wake Up.’<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So I pressed it another fourteen times and the machine was just about ready to phone the local police precinct.\u00a0 But finally it went into some new state and I saw options down in the bottom LCD screen where you do all the button pushing.<\/p>\n

I pressed the button to show my library and found three loaded books.\u00a0 One of them was Dracula<\/em> by Bram Stoker<\/em>.\u00a0 Quite a good book and extremely scary in a much more subtle way than you might expect, having seen all the incompetent adaptations of it in the movies.\u00a0 So I pressed a down arrow button which was supposed to move me to Dracula.\u00a0 But it took about 3 full seconds for anything to happen on screen.\u00a0 So of course I kept pressing the button and got all screwed up and it took me half a minute just to move through a list of 3 books to the one I wanted.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

This is my design for the Nook version 2.0.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I finally got into Dracula the pages loaded with such an agonizing fistfight between black and white, with scratching, punching, and a general inability to decide which shade should gain the upper hand that I felt a little sorry for the poor book in the Nook.\u00a0 I didn’t really have the heart to turn another single page because it seemed like so much work for the little Nook.\u00a0 So I decided to look up a word with the built-in dictionary.\u00a0 This is one of those big braggable features of e-readers – the power to easily look up any word in a book on the spot!\u00a0 Well just you go and try it for yourself.\u00a0 Pick a little word right in the middle of the page.\u00a0 You have to use right, left, up and down arrows to move line by line, word by word to your little undefinable friend.\u00a0 Each press of an arrow key takes almost 3 full seconds to make the cursor move!\u00a0 Yep.\u00a0 Let me tell you right now and here that I would rather read a book in Chinese than use this barbaric torture device inflicted upon unsuspecting readers by the likes of Barnes & Noble.\u00a0 You will spend your life waiting for things to happen on a Nook and you will get so tired of it that you will put this thing in a drawer and never read another e-book as long as you live.\u00a0 You will sooner read War and Peace<\/em> underwater than use this fancy plastic drink tray to read another word.<\/p>\n

And here is where Steve Jobs<\/em> comes in.\u00a0 I think Jobs is a sneaky, creepy fascist who cares for nothing but turning us all into walking sales people selling to ourselves all day long with our own little personal cash registers.\u00a0 But this guy knows how to make a machine actually function.\u00a0 When you press a button on a Steve Jobs machine it hurries right on up and actually gets something done.\u00a0 It doesn’t wait 3 full seconds to move a cursor.\u00a0 His iPad<\/em> will turn this Nook thing into a rectangular Frisbee.\u00a0 Barnes & Noble will not be able to fix its problems with software updates.\u00a0 It’s beyond software.\u00a0 It’s a circuitry and hardware problem that requires a rebuild of the entire platform.\u00a0 Someone pushed this piece of junk through development without giving a damn about anyone.\u00a0 This is a get-your-money-back-quick machine.\u00a0 Imagine right now if you pressed the ‘A’ key on your keyboard and could count to 3 before an ‘A’ showed up on your monitor.\u00a0 Well, ladies and gentlemen that is the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader device!\u00a0 It actually made me feel as if I were holding a very old machine from the early twentieth century.\u00a0 It has something to do with all the effort of turning a page and all the scratchy letters blinking and stuttering.\u00a0 It’s like what would have passed for a computer 100 years ago.\u00a0 Very strange.\u00a0 And very expensive too.\u00a0 $259 for a machine that doesn’t want to wake up or turn the pages of my book is just too much to ask.\u00a0 Sorry Barnes & Noble, but you really must think about this a little harder.\u00a0 Really.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been so waiting with my bated breath and all for this magical Nook machine from Barnes & Noble.\u00a0 I was in a right dither tonight about an hour and a half ago as I shoved my reading glasses into my pocket, put my regular glasses on my face and piled into my car for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,163,319],"tags":[716,2500,717,222,714,715],"class_list":["post-3628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-publishing","category-opinion","category-technology","tag-barnes-noble","tag-books","tag-e-ink","tag-ebook","tag-ereader","tag-nook"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3628"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3640,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3628\/revisions\/3640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}