eReader bargain

I just got the morning's spam from Barnes & Noble and it has an
interesting deal in it. The Nook First Edition WiFi is on sale for $89.
As far as I can tell, this is the straight unit, not a unit discounted
because it runs adware.

Almost certainly this bargain is brought on by both the new Kindle
offerings and a desire to empty out their warehouses in favor of the
newer Nook models, but I have been using this unit for quite some time
now and as a straight eReader, I actually prefer it over its newer
siblings because physically I like its heft and balance and since it's
e-Ink, it has the long battery life.

Primary document formats for Nook are ePub and PDF. There's a neat
plugin for Firefox that will capture a series of web pages and assemble
them into ePubs, although YMMV, since some web page layouts make the
trip better than others. There's also a Firefox plugin that you can use
to read ePubs, which I use for checking the documents I create before I
dump them to the Nook.

The downsides of the Nook FE are that for those rare cases when you want
to type, the soft keyboard is slow and unreliable. And the web browser
isn't anything to brag about. Among other things, you can't download
through it, so any Project Gutenberg books have to be side-loaded via
the cable.

This is an Android device and it is rootable, although you have to be
brave and careful because failed root attempts can brick it. If you
really want rootable, go with the Nook Color. To root it, just write an
image to a microSD card, flip open the little rubber protective tab in
the corner, pop in the card and cycle power. Even I can do that without
screwing up!

   Tim


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