For the Wife: Nook Simple Touch w/Glowlight or Kindle Paperwhite
I've decided an E-reader will be a perfect gift for my wife this Christmas. But which one? Nook and Kindle seem to be the big dawgs in this market. I gave their top E-reader models a look, but dang Barnes & Noble and Amazon have the Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight and the Kindle Paperwhite for the same price. That right there spoiled my usual strategy of deciding between competing products.
So
I spent several hours analyzing the Kindle Paperwhite and the Nook Simple Touch
with Glowlight when I should have been studying for my final exam coming up in
2 days. So I thought I would post what I found here. This
information is current as of today December 12, 2012. I found myself
reading so many things about the Kindles and the Nooks, only to realize the
information was 2 or 3 years old. And in this techno market, that's
ancient history. From all of my jumbled scatterbrain notes I put together
a table to analyze the two. I ordered it so that the features most
important to me were at the top, and the farther down on the table they are,
the less important they are to me. A shaded blue box means that that
E-reader won that category. So here it is.
Footnotes
for table:
(1)
11,000 libraries now support Kindle E-books. I checked at my library here in Tucson,
Arizona. They do support Kindle, but Penguin Publishing does not. So I guess
any books published by Penguin Publishing are not available to Kindle users
at my library.
(2)
To get the Kindle Paperwhite 3G you have to spend $179.
(3)
The Kindle and Nook have basically (maybe exactly?) the same lending rules.
Kindle relaxed their rules recently. They made it so you could lend your
books more than once. I think you can lend them once a month. They also made
it so more of their E-books were lendable. The caveat here is that you have
to be an Amazon Prime Member to get the relaxed lending rule perks. It costs
$79 annually to be a Prime Member.
(4)
It costs $20 to remove the ads, which you can do at anytime.
(5)
The concave surface on the back of the Nook Glowlight makes for a nice grip,
and it has a slight rubberized coating. The wider sides allow you to hold the
Nook comfortably without touching the screen. The Nook Glowlight weighs
slightly less.
(6)
The wall charger costs an extra $10 for the Kindle Paperwhite.
(7)
To replace the battery in the Kindle Paperwhite you have to send it to the
factory.
(8)
You probably won’t need it, but it is nice to have additional memory if
necessary.
(9)
The Nook Glowlight lasts two months with the light off.
(10)&(11) Kindles E-readers were previously equipped with speakers and text-to-speech capability, but those features have been removed in Paperwhite. I thought that would have been pretty cool, but it did at least make my choice easier.
(12)
You might think the Kindle Paperwhite wins this one, but I don't really think
this is an advantage. It's a case of "less is more." Even the
Kindle says you are supposed to use the dimmer light in the dark. I think the
light was made to read in the dark, but for some reason everyone thinks the
Kindle Paperwhite is better because the light is way brighter. The bright
setting is to read in an already lit room—what is the point of that? Isn't
the point of any E-reader to look like a piece of book paper, not like a computer
screen? And you can never turn the lights all the way off. Yes I know it
looks like the lights are off when it is on the lowest setting, it just seems
wasteful to my sensibilities.
Extra
Thoughts:
This
was a really tough choice to make. One thing that helped me decide was the
Nook with Glowlight gives you more stuff for the same price. Ad-free viewing
and a wall charger are included with the Nook Glowlight, features which cost
$20 and $10 extra respectively for the Kindle Paperwhite. Also Barnes &
Noble seems to be out to please the customer a little more. You probably
think I'm crazy for saying that. And yes I know Amazon has a fantastic,
well-earned, true reputation for customer service. But hear me out. The Nook
came out with E-book lending first. They also came out with a touch screen
before the Kindle. They were also the first to put in a light for nighttime
reading, something customers were really wanting. Even though Amazon has
perfected the light and made lending better (for a $79 annual charge), Barnes
& Noble was the first. I am hoping Barnes & Noble will make further
strides in customer satisfaction before Amazon, perhaps better lending rules
that you don't have to pay for.
Being
able to read Epub E-books was important to me. Even though the Kindle can
have them all switched over to Mobi by Calibre for free, this was just
another step I didn't want my wife (the Nook is a Christmas present for her)
to have to deal with. So I like that the Nook can read Epub directly.
I
did lots of price checking of many types of E-books. Usually the prices were
the same for the Kindle and the Nook Book, but sometimes they were a little
more for the Nook. But with Epub I could almost always find another seller
online who was selling it for the Kindle price or maybe even a smidgeon
lower. You can use E-book comparison websites to compare prices of any book
(InkMesh.com is one particular comparison site). Some sites that on occasion
have lower prices than Amazon and Barnes & Noble are BooksOnBoard.com,
Diesel-ebooks.com, and ebooks.com (none of these sites have formats for
Kindles). Also of note is that Amazon has many of the classics for Kindle for
free, while Barnes & Noble charges for them (they are solely a bookstore
after all), but with the magic of the internet and comparison websites (and
oh yeah, the library has plenty of E-books) it is easy to find Epub websites
that also have the books free for Nooks.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Even
though I was leaning slightly towards the Nook by this time, one thing made
it particularly harder to decide. My wife's mother and granny have
Kindles. So they could have lent books to each other. But since the lending
rules aren't that great anyway for the Kindle (unless you pay $79 a year) or
the Nook, I figured this was a small price to pay. There are lending websites
and Facebook pages set up so you can borrow books from anyone in exchange for
a small sum ($1.99 on one site) or if you have a book someone else
wants to read. So the Kindle has the advantage here simply because it has
more users, and therefore a larger population to share with.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One
last thing I heard in many comments sections, but couldn't really find a solid
source for. It seemed many people had Kindles that broke easily. I didn't see
anybody complain about broken Nooks. It may just be a side effect of having a
larger Kindle population, so more people report broken ones. And the people
also said Amazon was really quick at replacing the broken Kindles for free
under the 1-year warranty. But what happens after the warranty? Let's just
say I have a lovely, sweet wife who has had more than her fair share of
broken cell phones, and a potentially fragile device was something I would
rather avoid. Apparently the case for the Kindle is a good protector. I'll
probably pick a Nook case up for my wife too.
Conclusion:
What
it eventually came down to was this. I found a brand new Nook Simple Touch
with Glowlight on Craigslist for $80. That's only $11 more than Kindle is charger for their basic E-reader this holiday season! The guy had won it at a raffle from
work, and he didn't want it. That made my choice so much easier. Ha ha.
I
hope this helps you sift through all of the information out there. Good luck
in choosing your E-reader! If you have personal experiences with these
devices (I would especially like to hear about durability issues with the
Kindles and Nooks), or have some other information that would help other
readers decide please leave a comment. Thanks for reading!
|
I really, really love my Nook babe. Thank you for being so thoughtful in your search, thrifty in your purchase, and helpful - by sharing what you researched with everybody else. :)
ReplyDelete