Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

It's been bugging me for a long time.

My wife and I have been members for MANY years. I frequently get complimented on the age of my membership card. Yet I am very disappointed at something that happened several months ago: the removal of the New section from apparently all book sections, yet not from your video section.

I read A LOT. On average, I read a book about a book a week. I also follow a lot of different authors, and some post photographs of the ARCs that they receive. This gives me a heads-up of what I can expect to see on shelves in the near future. Except I can't see them on your shelves because the new releases are now intermixed among all the old releases and I have to dive deep, author by author, to find specific titles. And that's assuming that they're in the specific section that I'm looking for: many has been the time that I've looked for an author in science fiction only to find that they've been put under YA.

You have created a losing proposition for me. I avoid buying books on Amazon because I want physical book stores. We just lost our two local book stores, now I have to drive 90-120 minutes to get to one, and that means three of your stores in Las Cruces or El Paso. And that means frustration of not being able to easily see what's new. So where's the advantage of being able to easily see what's new? There is none. There's nothing prominently displayed to whet my appetite and lure me in to opening my wallet for a $30 hardback.

You've made your stores no longer a destination. Before, when I drove to Phoenix, I ALWAYS made it a point to hit one or two of your stores to see what's new. But that's no longer true, because you no longer display what's new. So what's the point? If I have to go online to find out what's new, THEN go to a store to buy it, I might as well buy it online.

I avoid buying books online to support local book stores and jobs. I don't buy my medications by mail to support local jobs. These are things that are important to me. But what you've done is encouraging me to channel money that I reserve for books in to online venues, and that may not go to B&N.

I've been shopping at B&N since the 1970s at B. Dalton in Christown and Metrocenter in Phoenix. The stores back then had sections for both Science Fiction and Fantasy, then ultimately merged them. I used to buy old copies of Analog magazine by the grocery sack. I am a book hound. I am not a casual reader, I am a ravenous reader, and you are frustrating me.

As I said, you've made it so that your stores are no longer a primary destination. I still stop there if I happen to be in the area and have other places to go, or obviously, if my wife wants to go. But now my personal itch must be scratched online.

I really hope that you put the New Releases area back in your stores. That would make me quite happy indeed.

We had a sizable tax return this year, and I decided on a Nexus 7 tablet. My original goal was to root it, install a command shell program, and use it to experiment with PHP, MySQL, and some mods for WordPress and my photography web site, WayneWestPhotography.com/gallery. My ultimate goal is to have a PHP start page that will show rotating images from the gallery and also the latest post on my blog. I'm certain that I can do this as I've been doing database work for over half my life and have lots of experience.

But a Nexus 7 is really not the right tool for the job, especially considering that I regularly tote around a MacBook Air, which at its heart is a full-blown Unix operating system, not a mostly Unix OS like Android.

I did a lot of research before deciding on the Nexus. My typical research methodology is to look at the worst reviews on web sites to see what kind of problems that I might anticipate. The two contenders rapidly boiled down to the Nexus 7 and the Samsung. The Nexus problems were predominantly screen breakage and lots of complaints of poor tech support from the manufacturer, Asus. And in almost all 1 star reviews a tech from Asus posted his personal work email address and offered to help personally. I was quite impressed by that. In fact, I emailed the guy and told him I was considering a Nexus and he actually replied! Double-plus good on that one!

The main downside on the Samsung was that it was only an 8-gig model, so right off the bat you have to buy an additional memory card, which would make it more expensive than the 16-gig Nexus.

So I bought the $200 Nexus. After adding in a case, the breakage protection, and tax, it's up to $340. Which was more than I was willing to spend, but with a 14 day return period, I thought it worth the experiment.

I bought it last Wednesday during a really major dust storm. I started researching tools for rooting it, and succeeded over the weekend. And I really was not impressed.

We own an iPad, and it's a great device for quite a number of things, but it can't really be used as a development platform and it's too heavy for me to use as an ebook reader in bed. The Nexus is half the weight and worked fine as an ebook reader, but it suffers from one very major problem: unreliable.

Aside from the iPad, I have an iPhone 4S and had an iPod Touch. Application crashes on the iOS devices happen, but with no where near the frequency as I experienced with the Nexus. I hate having to re-start apps. It was a case of good, but not good enough.

So Monday I un-rooted it, returned it to its factory OS configuration, and returned it. And bought a Nook Simple Touch with Glow Light. It cost about a third what the Nexus cost. It's small enough that I can put it in the pocket of my cargo pants, and it reads ePub, which the Kindles won't do directly. I also have a Nook tablet, a slightly older 7” model, and I was surprised to find the Simple Touch doesn't have a web browser, I'm assuming because of the limitations of the E Ink display. So it does have the inconvenience of having to plug in a USB cable to load books if you're not buying them from the B&N web site. I don't mind that as it takes some time to read a book, so it's not a daily inconvenience. And they advertise that the battery is good for ONE MONTH with the light on!

For me, it's a pretty darn good ebook reader. Very, very light for reading in bed and displays text quite well. The light is good for reading in the dark or low-light conditions. I'm currently reading the first volume of Beethoven's letters and am enjoying the experience and have lots of other cool stuff loaded up from Project Gutenberg, which is my main source of ebooks.

"In response to DC Entertainment's agreement to exclusively offer digital versions of certain titles in Amazon Kindle format, Nook maker Barnes & Noble has begun pulling DC Entertainment's graphic novels off its shelves. Confirming the decision, B&N said in a statement, 'To sell and promote the physical book in our store showrooms, and not have the eBook available for sale would undermine our promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime.' Nice to see the pair is still able to keep their feud fresh on the 11th anniversary of the 1-Click patent infringement lawsuit."

I can understand B&N's viewpoint, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out long-term.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/09/0139200/bn-yanks-dc-titles-after-exclusive-amazon-deal


In other news, B&N bought what was left of Borders and has been sending out emails to Borders book club members telling them that unless they opt-out, their information will be integrated into the B&N datamart. On one hand I don't have a problem with this as B&N and Borders were my main brick & mortar book sources. On the other hand, it sets a bad precedent for acquisitions and data privacy.