Barnes and Noble’s new Nook Considered (From a Distance)

 I don’t think I’ve ever been, nor do I think I’ll ever really be, what hardcore tech types and marketing gurus like to call an “early adopter.” I tend to adopt late, if I bother to adopt at all. Let the early adopters deal with the high prices, buggy performance, shipping issues, production shortages, and the fact that all the cool features typically come out in the second generation. The early buzz on Barnes and Noble’s new Nook e-reader indicates that there may just be good news for those of us who habitually lag behind the times.

Taken on its own merits, the Nook would appear to be a worthy competitor to the Kindle. It’s premature to call it the “Kindle killer,” as Wired has; the fact that Amazon was there first (at least vis-a-vis the Nook, if not the e-reader market in general) with a good product means that Nook’s presumed dominance — even with a product that looks this good — isn’t a done deal just yet. Entropy goes a long way toward reinforcing brand loyalty.

To my mind, there’s also reason to believe, at least for now, that e-books won’t have the same kind of explosive growth that iPods had in their early days. One reason, as much as it pains me to say this, is that people just don’t read. Oh, sure, some people will pick up the occasional mass-market paperback, but I can’t see, say, your typical reader of romance novels plunking down what amounts to the cost of more than two dozen books for an e-book reader, no matter how snazzy.

There’s something else at work here, too. One reason Sony’s Walkman took off was that even though you could play all the cassettes you could purchase, you didn’t have to purchase them new. If, for instance, you had “Abbey Road” on LP and wanted to take it with you while you went on a jog, all you had to do was buy a blank tape, dub a copy, and go. The iPod’s genius, similarly, isn’t one of kind, but of scale. Now, I know that thousands of Apple fans will take me to task on this (if any of them actually read it), but I think—if I may be so immodest—that I’m onto something here. What’s revolutionary about the iPod isn’t so much the user interface, or any of the other bells and whistles; like any other high-capacity MP3 player, what was revolutionary was the ability, fueled in part by P2P and other kinds of licit and illicit file sharing,* to carry your entire record collection, or at least a sizeable chunk of it, in the palm of your hand. The rest has come down largely to the kind of marketing and brand cachet at which Apple has precious few rivals (and which goes a long way toward explaining why people will fork over money on something that has as many restrictions and quirks as the iPod does).

So, moreso than cost, the thing that could keep old-schoolers like myself (I can’t be the only one) from adopting something like the Nook with unbridled enthusiasm is the time—sometimes a lifetime—spent collecting books. I can no more imagine reading High Fidelity or Forty Stories once in a lifetime than I can imagine listening to “Once in a Lifetime” once in a lifetime. If you’re of a certain frame of mind, you buy and keep books not because they make nice décor or will impress your friends, but because you genuinely enjoy the act of reading, and you intend to read these things more than once.

Herein lies the problem. I cannot, as it stands now, back up my book collection, all the way from The Poky Little Puppy to 2666 the way I’ve done and continue to do with my music. Now, maybe one of these days we’ll get lucky, and some publisher will wise up and start to do what record companies have been doing of late, issuing cross-platform releases that allow someone who’s purchased a hard copy to have what amounts to a free digital backup. That day, given how slowly publishing moves even compared to the music industry’s glacial embrace of technology, could be a decade or longer away. I predict, though, that the first company to crack the particular nut that is the “backup dilemma” will gain a decisive advantage.

Come to think of it, there’s a veritable laundry list of features I’d like to see rolled out, whether on future versions of the Nook, or on another yet-to-be conceived reader (I’m not a brand snob). Besides the features the Nook already includes, there are a few that this avid reader wouldn’t mind seeing. Enhanced graphics capability would come in close to the top of the list. Even if you’re not the type who reads Orwell for the pictures, you’d still have to admit that reading, say, a book on Sebastião Salgado’s photography (to say nothing of even a mundane magazine pictorial) is an impoverished experience sans photographs. Given that the reader allows its user to import JPG images, it’s not as though this is somehow impossible; it could stand to be done better. Similarly, it’d be nice to see better use made of the device’s built-in 3G capabilities; good search, indexing, and concordance features that allow you, the reader (and Nook, the reader) to make connections between seemingly disparate bits of text, to search Wikipedia for obscure bits of marginalia, or to simply jump to a work cited in another work’s footnotes, would make this a useful tool for research. A feature that allows for sound or video macros to be embedded in text could also radically change the reading experience. Imagine, if you will (humor me, will ya?), reading Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise, or Marcus Gray’s Last Gang in Town and being able to hear the music being discussed on the page as it’s being discussed; or reading a biography of Hitchcock and jumping to scenes from Psycho. Sure, the Nook has MP3 playback already; the trick would be embedding the content with a purchased book, rather than assuming that if you had the taste or foresight, you’d own the tunes already. Finally, web capabilities would be good (and, on a subscription basis, a way for B&N to pick up still more revenue); you likely wouldn’t use the Nook to replace your Crackberry, but there are a host of uses to which the Nook could be put and still remain faithful to its original purpose.

So. While Sony, and the other e-book readers that have come down the pike over the last couple of years, haven’t made much of a dent in Amazon’s market share, the Kindle isn’t the only game in town. Hopefully the arrival of the Nook, warts and all,  marks the point where things get interesting.

*Napster and its other black- and gray-market cousins were, I think, as responsible for the iPod’s success as anything done by Apple.

Further reading:
Barnes and Noble has a Nook microsite here that has product specs, reviews, and a host of other information of varying degrees of utility.