A New Toy!!!!

Just in time for the holidays another ebook device hits the market. The long awaited Barnes and Noble Nook looks pretty cool, to tell you the truth. It does everything the Kindle and others does for a fairly decent price. At $250 you get a wireless machine that stacks up and in some areas surpasses the Amazon Kindle. Personally, I like the clean look of it. Maybe it's just me but are there a gazillion buttons on the Kindle??? The Nook looks simple to use, it displays the book covers and simply by touching the pic, you can open your book. Looks pretty easy to me.

Probably the BEST thing about this new handy dandy machine is the fact that other readers will probably all go down in price. Now for ebook lovers a device like this can't come more highly recommended than by ME. I love my little ebookwise 1150 BUT I lately I find myself drooling over the new stuff that's hitting the market. Talked with someone at Romanticon who is trying out a Cool-Er reader and has no problems with it either. The bottom line is, readers have a bigger and better selection, it seems, almost every day.

The loops have been buzzing about the new Nook for the past week or so and lots of writers have discussed the 'sharing' feature involving B&Ns reader. If you own a Nook you can 'share' a book with friends. This, I must admit, is pretty damn disturbing but here's how I gather it works. If you have a Nook you can send a book to a friend for 14 days. This can be sent to their Nook, computer, I-phone, whatever. While that 'friend' has the book, you will be unable to read yours and it disappears from the friends computer, Nook, or Iphone in fourteen days. So it really is geared toward a 'loan' only. It's temporary and I imagine since it disappears after fourteen days, it wouldn't end up on a pirate site somewhere. Most Nook's titles will cost roughly $10 and that includes bestsellers and B&N will also offer lots of 'free reads' as well. My main gripe about many readers is they aren't available anywhere but in the US. What? Are there no readers in the rest of the world? I know there must be a reason these aren't available elsewhere. I don't know what it is exactly but I wish they'd change that. E-book readers should be made available to everyone.

As a writer who writes for the ebook market, I'm personally thrilled to find such a selection of readers on the market these days. Competition is a good thing and will drive the costs down, too. Lately, I've even seen commercial after commercial on television about the Sony, the Kindle, and I suspect we'll see plenty on the Nook, too. The main thing this tells me is that ebooks and ebook readers are coming into the mainstream. This can only mean good things for those of us who write and read ebooks.