When Barnes & Noble Inc. began to sell its first electronic reading device, the Nook, a year ago, I found it as welcome as a bookcase landing on my toe. It was a terrible design — slow, confusing and buggy.
The successor, the Nookcolor, is a huge improvement and the best dedicated e-reader on the market this holiday season.
The new color touch screen makes navigation and reading much easier. At $249, it is great for consumers who are not yet willing to spring for a pricier tablet computer such as the iPad.
The original Nook had two screens: one big, Kindle-like gray-scale “electronic ink” display for reading and one small touch-enabled color display for navigation. It was like an unholy marriage between a Kindle and an iPod Touch, worse than either product on its own.
The Nookcolor, which went on sale two weeks ago, dispenses with the e-ink screen. The color screen has swelled to 7 inches diagonally, taking over the whole surface and making the Nookcolor look like the mid-sized product of a happy union between an iPhone and an iPad.
Other color e-book readers have hit the market this year from smaller names, including Sharper Image with its Literati. They’ve been hampered by poor screens that make the text shimmer uncomfortably. Barnes & Noble’s screen uses the same technology as Apple Inc. does for its iPad, and it’s wonderfully crisp.
E-ink readers such as the Kindle do have one selling point: They provide a more paper-like reading experience, which sounds attractive to people who find that staring at a computer screen for hours on end is uncomfortable. However, I believe most of this discomfort derives from screens that are set to shine too brightly. I found the Nookcolor quite comfortable to read on, partly because it’s easy to adjust the brightness of the…