The Nook: Perfect Mobile Device for Text or Virtual Bookstore
The release of the Barnes and Noble Nook should have been exciting, but it wasn’t. It appears to be the best designed reader to date; it has wifi and 3G, it lets you share books and access PDFs, and it runs a cutting edge, open source operating system. It’s so well designed that it highlighted the real flaws with itself and its main competitor, Amazon’s Kindle. The problem with these readers is that they are both products of companies’ whose main business is selling books that have partnered with telecommunication companies for 3g service.Unfortunately, Booksellers and 3g providers do not want to build the device that lets the user get the most out of its technology, they want to build a gadget that sells the most content on the lowest possible amount of bandwidth.
Does the engadget of ereaders have to come from outside of the bookselling industry? Probably. Think of how Apple revolutionized the the music industry — it allowed people to easily put all the content that they already had access to into their more accessible format. They did this because they had one goal in mind: to sell as many units as it could.
It’s not what the Nook is lacking, but its extra baggage that’s holding it back. The 3G means that Barnes and Noble cannot open up the device to the droves of developers that are creating apps for Android because of the bandwidth issues and cost considerations that were surely addressed when signing up with AT&T. When it comes down to it Barnes and Noble wants you to use that bandwidth to purchase their product, not to check your email, edit word documents, or access the freely available blogs and newspapers on the wider web. One day the Nook may be able to do all this and more — Barnes and Noble could open up it to Android developers and start an app store in their up coming sales war with Amazon. At least the Nook has what it takes under the hood to become a powerful mobile device and not just an online bookstore, that alone puts it ahead of the closed minded Kindle.
