Get your E-Book reader before nobody cares anymore

I triple-dog dare you to go into Barnes & Noble and not look at the Nook dis­play. You won’t be able to do it. Though the device is all but sold out until early 2010, the mono­lithic in-store dis­plays have fancy paper-cutouts in the shape of a Nook with fea­tures and spec­i­fi­ca­tions on them which I’m sure will be just fine wrapped and under the tree this Christ­mas, thank you very much.

The Nook (Technologizer’s great review here) is part of the lat­est gad­get bub­ble to take hold of the elder and tech­no­rati set, the e-book reader. Like the Sony Reader and the Ama­zon Kin­dle before it, the Nook allows you to buy books from the Barnes & Nobel store, down­load them via 3g nearly instantly, and begin read­ing. The Nook brings not much to the dis­cus­sion that the other two devices haven’t cov­ered; E-Ink screen, fancy key­board, books and news­pa­pers. The killer fea­tures on the Nook that are sup­posed to wipe out the Sony and the Kin­dle are, well, two.

First, there’s a color screen. No, not the whole thing, just an awk­ward strip across the bot­tom which allows you to see small cov­ers of your books, and con­verts to device nav­i­ga­tion when you’re not brows­ing.

Sec­ond, you can lend books. This one might have been a game changer, as nei­ther the Sony or the Kin­dle allow you to loan books to other device-weilding book mavens. A game-changer were it not for the fact that you can only loan a book once. Once. One time for that book, period. It’s a gift that’s only almost as good as not being able to loan books at all. With friends like these… yeesh.

I have the Kin­dle 2 — Amazon’s remix of their self-acclaimed hit e-book reader. I love it. For sit­ting down and read­ing a book with my feet up on the couch, with cof­fee, and maybe a cruller, it’s the per­fect device. The screen is clear, and the fact that it’s not back­lit means no eye-strain for long reads. It’s easy to nav­i­gate. It’s com­pact and ter­rific for vaca­tions on which I’d usu­ally lug along a book­bag. It’s the best way to read a news­pa­per, too. Seri­ously, dead-tree apol­o­gists haven’t spent enough time on the Kin­dle; it’s like hav­ing a news­pa­per that is clean, orga­nized, and search­able, right there in your hands.

But, then, I love cross-word puz­zles. The Kin­dle has a key­board, so I assume I’ll just turn to the cross­word and get solv­ing, right? Nope. No dice. No cross­words on the Kin­dle. For that, you have to turn to some­thing like the com­puter or the iPhone, which I hap­pen to have in my pocket. OK, fine. No cross­words. How about books not in the Kin­dle fancy-format? You bet. PDF. Effec­tive two weeks ago, Ama­zon announced that Kin­dle users can now drag PDFs to their Kin­dle 2’s when con­nected to their com­put­ers, or use their Kin­dle email address and have the doc­u­ments processed and mailed for a fee.

Or, I could go back to my iPhone and read any damned thing I want right now, PDF or not. And this, right here, is why hard­ware e-book read­ers will be one of the shortest-lived gad­gets in tech. They’re very cool, until you real­ize they’re never quite cool enough.

The Kin­dle epit­o­mizes the para­dox of the sin­gle func­tion device: focus on one thing and do it excep­tion­ally well, while your com­peti­tor focuses on noth­ing and deliv­ers much with medi­oc­rity. Turns out that in all but the most extreme cases, peo­ple want a device the does more, more often, and smaller. I can read my Kin­dle or my Nook books on my iPhone. I can read PDFs. I can edit doc­u­ments and take pic­tures and send emails and play games that let me push peo­ple down stairs.

The hard­ware fail­ings of the Kin­dle and this ilk come only when you have really dis­cov­ered your delight in the device. You love read­ing so much on it, that you want to read more. You want to read email and web­pages. But you can’t, not with­out suf­fer­ing through the pain of lag in the E-Ink screen. You want speed, but you can’t have that either; the device was designed to do all the heavy lift­ing that comes with turn­ing pages, for cry­ing out loud. Any­thing more and you need a lap­top.

Luck­ily, and where I hap­pen to be quite bull­ish, is in the e-book as a tech­nol­ogy and plat­form for fur­ther devel­op­ment. The best thing that could hap­pen to read­ing books elec­tron­i­cally would be for all these devices to fail in spite of them­selves — in spite of the indus­try they’ve kin­dled. That may just mean that peo­ple have redis­cov­ered their love of the writ­ten word beyond email and the web, and that they demand more of the tools that help them con­sume it.

For any­one look­ing for a rec­om­men­da­tion before you head out shop­ping for that some­one spe­cial, I’ll keep it sim­ple. Buy a Kin­dle. It’s less stu­pid than the oth­ers. Then see if you remem­ber how to read.