Look, Look a Nook

For my birthday, Aaron bought me, among other things, a Nook. Yes, I am officially part of the e-book crowd. And you know, it is pretty nice. As Aaron will point out if I do not, I did not really use my Nook for books initially. No, I was pleasantly distracted by the sudoku games that come on it. It is an excellent thing to do while watching football! You cannot read and watch football, but watching football and not doing something else feels lazy to me. So, I played sudoku. Yes, this is still fairly lazy, but I am exercising my mind...and my right index finger.

For some time over the summer and early fall, Barnes & Noble was putting out 10 classic books in electronic format weekly - for free! Once I learned of this, I began purchasing them, which led to a virtual library of about 90 classic books...before I even had something to read the e-books on. Yes, it is hard for me to pass up free books. In Aaron's gift to me, he included a print out from our local library explaining where and how to check out e-books.

This sheet came in handy when I wanted to borrow an ebook. However, being that I have a Mac and people still do not realize how many people have Macs and therefore why it is a good idea to have software that works on a Mac, it was not that easy. The program I needed to get the ebook on my Nook was a pain in the rear. Several support forums later and I got my book! (This is not the Nook's fault in any way; it is the Adobe application I needed to get the book from the library, to my Mac to my Nook that was the issue.)

I decided to read The Passage by Justin Cronin as my first official e-book. It looked like a good book that would be enjoyable to read on paper and an excellent "fun read" to test out how the Nook works as a reader. All in all, I am impressed with it and I only saw a few minor things that could slow the reading experience. The hardest part is that if you want to refer back a few pages to earlier text, on the Nook you cannot just skip back to the desired page. You have to push the back button until you get there, which can be mildly annoying. However, as I did with a drawing in The Passage, you can easily bookmark pages that are kept in a list for quick referral.

I like reading in my Nook. It is more portable than some books I read and it is not difficult to read from at all. If I get bored of one book, I can quickly flip to another. And, as I expect over this Christmas flying season, it will help me reduce the weight of my baggage by a good 5-10 pounds. Books are not light, people, and carrying 5 of them with you on board because having them in the checked bag puts it over the poundage limit is a scenario I would like to avoid this year. Now, I can carry 111 books with me and it all fits in my purse.