The Screaming Viking

I’ve had this thing for a few weeks now and have given it a pretty thorough shake down.  For all the good stuff I’ve said about it, the little sucker has a few problems…

First and foremost is the proprietary connection it uses.  I don’t know why they couldn’t just go with a standard micro usb connector for charging and data transfer.  Maybe they thought it would generate some additional revenue for them if they made it proprietary?  I dunno.  It’s the same shape as a micro usb…you can shove a micro usb in the slot…but it won’t charge or make sufficient connection for a PC.  This connection is also fragile and in a poor spot.  It’s directly at the bottom of the nook.  If I’m reading…with the device plugged in…what are the odds of me bumping this connection against my chest, stomach, or whatever?  Pretty good…i’ve done it a few times.  It also bends -really- easy and the end coming off the cable isn’t of the best quality.  I’ve harped on the kid to be extremely careful with it…but I can see us buying another cable for her pretty soon.  I’d like another for myself, one to have connected to the computer permanently and one that I use to charge it (usually in the bedroom).  The connection was poorly thought out.

That’s the main hardware problem I have with the device.  A buddy has complained about the battery life, and it’s true it goes dead a lot faster than other readers that seem to last months on a charge.  Getting 8 hours out of a tablet though doesn’t seem all that bad to me.  I guess I still view this thing as a tablet and less as a book reader.  If a guy is going to do a lot of traveling (hours on the plane, hours waiting, hours traveling from/to the airport) yeah it might die in there somewhere.  I’m not sure what the screen limitations are…but it would be pretty cool if this thing had a “book mode” or something where it goes into an extremely low battery usage level.  Maybe something like that is possible with a software update…but most likely another hardware revision would be necessary.  I doubt it’s a high priority…but it would be awfully handy.

The next problems I have with it are software problems.  I’m not sure if they could “easily” be fixed…but they could certainly be addressed.

Currently, there is no way to push your own content to the device via wireless.  Maybe that’s by design.  It is very easy to download books from B&N…get magazines and so forth.  Maybe the idea of having to hook it up, download to a pc then push to the device is something the designers knew would be a little cumbersome and would push people to the B&N store.  If that’s the case…that’s fine.  I don’t have a problem with a company trying to make money via something like this.  It’s unfortunate and I believe it can be remedied by jail breaking the device.

The last problem I have with it goes to core functionality and something I don’t think anyone really tested.  It’s a pain to manage a large number of books on the device.  I’m not sure what the lowest number to put on there and still be a pain is exactly, but I know for sure that 200+ suck bad.  The device has something called a “shelf” built in to it, and you can put one book on multiple shelves…the problem with this is I have to manually do that on the device itself.  For just a few books it’s not a problem…but then for a few books is this really necessary?  But to go through and manually do this “shelf” process for 100′s of books is a tedious and dare I say approaching impossible task.  It would be nice to see some sort of management type software on the PC to push these books to the device.  Calibre fills some of this need, but it doesn’t sort the books on the device in any discernible manner.

In an earlier blog I said “it might be easier to keep just a few books on the device” but after some discussion with a buddy that’s not really what I want.  I have this device with 5 or so gig of free internal memory and an add-on card with whatever you want to buy (I have an additional 16gig)…why can’t I store all my books on there?  I should be able to some how store thousands of books on this device and not have to manually sort each one of them.  They should be in categories by default.  I’m waiting for my plane and I finish up “Game of Thrones” for example…when I’m on the plane I decide I want something from the sports genre…whatever I have on there that fits this criteria should already be on that “shelf” so I can easily browse it.  I shouldn’t have to search through thousands of books.  Beyond that, they should also be categorized by author, title, series, publisher, year…etc etc etc.  Any sort of relevant meta data that can be tagged on these files should be there.  The device should read all of this in the background.  When I hit the library button I should get the options: Browse by (title, author, series….) and a free form search window.  The search is already there…and from what I understand you can search by author and tittle.  What If I just want to look around?

I’m sure the thought behind this is “why would you have a book on the device you don’t know about?”  There might be a little validity to that…but lets be real here…the device is setup so you can push your own files to it.  Given the proper meta-data it should automatically sort on this information without me having to manually do it.  If the device could sort by these fields, calibre would be able to handle the PC side just fine.

Those problems can be solved via software updates…and hopefully B&N, after having this thing in the wild for a while, sees some value in these features.  I’m still a fan of the device.  I think it’s very versatile and with some access to the app store it will be a pretty good little device.  A little better browser would rock, and when netflix gets their droid client out to the public this sucker will be pretty sweet.  The child uses her’s quite a bit to read, mess around on facebook (including real time chat) and listen to pandora.

Not sure if I mentioned this yet, but I’m really disappointed in how magazines look on the nook.  This has nothing to do with the device, it has more to do with my “in the clouds” expectations.  For whatever reason I had it in my head that magazines would be a kind of “web like” experience on the nook.  I wanted embedded media, and stuff designed to bring out the abilities of the device.  What I got instead was a magazine…imagine that.

It is handy to have all your magazines on a nice neat little device instead of scattered all over the place.  It takes up less space…the price per month for some magazines I’m interested in is fine….dunno, I was just hoping for more out of that aspect.  I will start phasing out my paper copies and getting them via nook…but it’s not good enough where I want them on the nook right now.

Another draw back to this nook magazine thing is most of the magazines I get are via some sort of ungodly cheap or free deal on the net.  A year of maxium free or for 2 bucks…something like that.  Maybe down the line that stuff will be available for the nook…but I think it’s pretty unlikely.

Since I acquired the nook I delved into acquiring ebooks to fill it up.  As I was sorting through the massive amount of books, magazines and various media available I ran in to a familiar problem…how do I manage all these files on my computer, push them to the device and manage them on the device once I have them on there.  My mentality going in to this was that I need to acquire as many books as possible so I have the widest selection available…just like mp3z.  It occurs to me, after a night of sorting through all this muck, that is the wrong approach to take.  The entertainment time for a book vs an mp3 is pretty different.  I need enough mp3z for probably 40hrs worth of listening.  It would be nice to be able to listen to music every day for 5 days at the office, not hear a repeat and actually like each of the songs.  Figure 3.5 min for each song…that’s 686 songs.  If you would like a little more variety, obviously the number goes up.

A book, on the other hand, should give you hours of entertainment…the main difference being that you aren’t really going to be able to do anything else while you are reading that book.  How long it takes me to read a book varies greatly depending on the book.  If I’m trying to really absorb the material I do read quite slow.  If it’s just trash reading I go through it pretty fast.  So lets say you read a page every 20 seconds…maybe less maybe more.  350 pages, gives you about 2hrs.  I figure I do about 100 pages an hour, so it would take me about 3.5hrs.  That doesn’t sound like much…but if you look at the 40hrs of music, you are working during that time…at the office, working around the house…where ever.  During the time with the book, you’re not doing anything else.  You have to carve out 3.5 hours of time where you’ll be left along to read.  This doesn’t seem like much…but once you add in work, a wife and kid…it’s not terribly easy to find a few hours to do nothing but read.  I figure I can go through about a book a week, if I decide to turn off the T.V…sometimes I read with the T.V. on…but I’m not really watching.  Reading is one of the few things I can completely immerse myself in and turn off the outside world.

If I figure I’m going to chew up a book a week…those 10,000 sci-fi/fantasy books I grabbed will last me 192 years (10,000 (book/week) / 52 (weeks/year)) .  On the other hand, 10,000 mp3z will only last me 24 full days (is that math right?)  10,000 x 3.5 (average time in min) = 35000 / 60 = 583.333 (hours) /24 = 24.3055 (days).  Looking at those numbers…it’s not all that important to have a ton of books.  I also found a place to get a hold of the “complete internet library” whatever the hell that means.  60gig worth of books…figure maybe an average of a meg per ebook?  61440 books…jesus!  I will never have time to read all that if I did nothing but read the rest of my life (maybe I could…looks like it’s 24.5 years of straight reading…assuming 3.5hrs/book).

Analysis Paralysis

Another problem I have with ebooks, just like with music, is I have very limited exposure to books…I don’t know what I like.  I like some fantasy books, I like sci-fi books…some fiction is decent…some biography, and I really dig on sports books.  Outside of that…I’ve no idea what I’d be interested in reading.  Even inside those genres I’m not sure what authors to take a look at.  I hear T.V. shows or other people suggest books or tell me about books they’ve read and I pick up the ones that sound interesting to me…but I’m not sure how to find these books on my own.

With the nook, you can manually push books to it or use calbre to push them over.  How do I name them on the file system?  Maybe author/series/title or something like that.  But how they are named on the file system has nothing to do with how the nook reads them or catalogs them.  There is no software that comes with this little sucker that allows me to manage a library and push files to it in a decent manor.  I don’t think anyone has thought about how to manage a “huge” library.  Something along the lines of 10k books, magazines and newspapers.  Maybe it’s not a problem that needs to be solved…maybe most people only carry a few books on there at a time, I dunno.  Calibre works alright, but I’m not a huge fan of it.  It’s pretty clunky.  I use it to convert from one format to another and push files to the device, but I can’t really use it to manage a library on my computer or something.  It’s just not very intuitive.

The nook has “shelves” and you can add books to them without too much problem…but it’s all touch screen and gets to be a bit cumbersome when you have 100′s of books on there.  So far I’ve put them on a shelf according to genre and on another shelf according to series name.  This seems to work alright…but we’ll see.  I think the most important thing I need to get over is the idea that I have to have as many books as possible.  Get a few…manage them and when I’m done with those or something else interests me, pick that up.

I spent yesterday home “sick” from work.  I slipped on the ice outside of fleetfarm…I banged up my knee…again and couldn’t walk.  While I was home, I got a chance to work on the kid’s nook a bit.  This device really entertains me…I think it’s value as an ebook reader is far eclipsed by it’s value as a “mindless surfing” tablet and periodical reader.  I think electronic magazines/newspapers will be far enhanced by embedded video/audio clips.  I’m still not sure what I’d be willing to pay for these things…but if I could get some kind of outdoors magazine with some multi-media content it would be worth more than the paper copy.  To say I’m fascinated by the nook is an understatement.

I didn’t read too much about it before I started playing around.  I just kind of messed around to find out what it could do.  I saw it has a “music” folder under the “my files” folder…clearly this is designed to be able to play some sort of music of your own.  I copied a lex and terry mp3 over to it and tried to play…epic fail.  It crashed the media player over and over again.  I thought maybe the file was too large and it was failing to buffer or something.  I copied over a much smaller file…same crashing problem.  At this point I took to the inter-webs, I saw that some people were having problems with playing media and an update from b&n took care of this.  Read the rest of this entry »