Who needs a Nook, or Kindle, or Sony e-book reader?

By Tom Collins

I just bought my first e-book specifically designed to be read in an e-book reader. Why? Because I didn't have to buy a stand-alone gizmo to read it! (I've bought other e-books and, for reasons that will be obvious momentarily, I like the O'Reilly model of selling a bundle of e-book formats that doesn't chain me to one gizmo or format.)

Yvonne was sitting in bed last night reading Trust Agents (food for another post) and tossed me a small flyer that Barnes & Noble sent along with the book, with the headline: "Free Barnes & Noble eReader." Having seen the price advertised for B&N's new "nook" entry in the gizmo wars, I was surprised and read on.

A few minutes later, I had downloaded the free PC version (you can get one for Mac, iPhone, or Blackberry, too). It came with several free "classic" books, but what strikes me as the "killer app" part of this app is the ability to use it on a full-featured, full powered, web-connected device: my laptop, in this case. Here's why.

After clicking on Shop for eBooks in my Free B&N eReader and learning that apparently Trust Agents is not (yet?) among the 1 million + titles available from B&N, I browsed the best sellers and bought a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw for $9.99 (print copy listed as $27.99).

I opened the book in my Free B&N eReader and quickly discovered that Gladwell had followed the recent formula for turning blog posts into a book (e.g. Guy Kawasaki's Reality Check) by turning his old New Yorker articles into one. Here's how he introduced that fact:

"All the pieces in What the Dog Saw come from the pages of The New Yorker, where I have been a staff writer since 1996. Out of the countless articles I’ve written over that period, these are my favorites."

But check this out: The quote you just read, I was able to select, copy, and paste directly from my free e-reader into my TypePad blog compose space. As a nifty added feature, the act of copying the quote added the quotation marks for me; when I pasted, they were just there!

E-Reader, meet e-Publisher!

This is the missing piece that has always left me unable to see why I'd want another dedicated device with less than the full spectrum of information tools to find, view, analyze, recombine, share.

Five years ago (feels like 500!!), when I was writing and consulting on knowledge management and information design for lawyers, I tinkered with this diagram to illustrate the process of collecting, connecting, and sharing the "dots" that make up our minds:

Any gizmo — no matter how cool it looks — that can't enable me to do all of that simultaneously leaves me unimpressed. So I'm not picking on B&N or it's Nook. I LOVE the fact that they've made a free eReader available for me to use on my laptop for portability, or my desktop.

I'll probably want to down-size the portable device I use a bit to, say, a netbook-size. But it must have a big hard-drive, a full, usable keyboard, a screen big enough to view AND edit documents and images, web connectivity, and all the processing and publishing software I use all the time.

Put a phone and camera into a device like that and I'm set! I don't want to squint and I don't like typing with my thumbs or a stylus. There, I've admitted how un-hip I am.

Hey, Amazon! Sony! Are you listening? When will gizmo manufacturers learn the lesson of the Wang word processor?

Comments

[Mary Anne Shew]

Tom~I bought a Kindle a couple of months ago and absolutely love it. Here are my reasons:

1. I love having a device totally dedicated to just books and reading. While I also love my Blackberry, I don't need to carry still another device with access to email.

2. The Kindle is slim and small enough to fit in the small backpack I carry everywhere as a purse. This means most of the books to which I refer all the time, like Getting Things Done and others, are right at hand when I want them.

3. When I'm out and about and I see on my BB that someone has sent me a PDF attachment, I can now read it on my Kindle rather than having to boot up a laptop (if I have it with me) or to wait until I return to my office.

4. Its power supply is more than enough for 2 weeks' worth of reading time. I don't need to hunt for an outlet when I'm just looking to sit down and relax with a book for an hour or two.

5. Taking a laptop to bed so I can read there is too much work. Also, my cats have a priority reservation for my lap during my reading time.

6. When I plug my Kindle into my laptop, I can copy the clippings.txt file to my hard drive to do what I want to do. (It wasn't until I learned this feature was on it that I bought it.)

7. The Kindle's screen is kinder on my eyes for long-term reading. Reading a computer screen for hours on end causes me a lot of eye strain.

In summary, it all depends on what you are looking for and how you want your technology to support your book-reading lifestyle.

[Tom Collins]

Hi Mary Anne,

Glad you're enjoying your Kindle.

We just got back from covering the North American Veterinary Conference for Purina and in prep for going we bought an HP Mini laptop (10" screen; slim design; very light weight) and used the built-in broadband card to add it to our Sprint cell phone account.

This comes close to the device I'm hoping for. I can get the free downloadable BN or Amazon reader and buy all the books I can fit in its 160GB hard drive. And I don't need to connect it to anything to interact with, process, re-purpose, and otherwise USE the information in the books.

We were able to log on and use Twitter to live-tweet from the conference sessions. I could have downloaded and clipped quotes from the books mentioned, if I'd wanted.

With Skype, we have at least some phone capabilities (not to mention video conferencing).

And tonight, we had it in bed watching the Hope for Haiti Now special on TV and just logged in to make a donation.

So, all in all, I'm still not a fan of dedicated, single-function devices like Kindle.

[Apple Computers]

I can get the free downloadable BN or Amazon reader and buy all the books I can fit in its 160GB hard drive. And I don't need to connect it to anything to interact with, process, re-purpose, and otherwise USE the information in the books.