The Nook - Updates & Answers

This is a short update after playing around with the Nook for a while, and some answers to the comments on the previous post.

In general, I can say the Nook is a fun device, and serves its main purpose, reading books, quite well. It's very light and portable, simple to operate, and it's you can change the font size and style for easier reading. I even played a few games of chess on it (it has chess and sudoku apps) to pass the time and it was fun. It does feels somewhat sluggish or even stuck once in a while, and I had to turn it off and on a few times after it became unresponsive.

I also do not expect to use its WiFi connectivity much, given other options for internet access such as a mobile phone. Browsing is not a very fun activity (you can only interact with the site through the narrow touch screen on the bottom, and the eInk display is slow to redraw and not well suited for interactive display).

Also, you can't buy books from the device using the Barnes & Noble online store, since it will only sell a book if you have an US IP address due to distribution agreements with regional book publishers. The solution to that problem is to go through a proxy or VPN on the computer to access the B&N store, and then transfer the downloaded books to the Nook using a USB cable.

The next thing I tried was to load some documents on the Nook, both scans and regular PDF documents. They are resized to fit the screen and cannot be zoomed in, but 10pt font was just legible, so the Nook fits the purpose well enough and I'll be copying my documents to the Nook as well. To my surprise, it also correctly displayed the content of PDF files created from Hebrew documents, although Hebrew filenames were not correctly displayed.

Finally, when you'll have an eReader of your own, remember to download Calibre - a great open source ebook management software.

Going Paperless - The Next Generation

Continuing the previous post about my transition from paper to digital, today it's all about books.

As I've been traveling for more than half a year, I always carried a couple of books with me and would swap them with other travelers or in used-book stores. This way I've read many books without them taking much space or weight. Books do not become any less interesting with usage, and I usually have little value for the book itself standing on my shelf after I've read it, except perhaps it's availability in case I wish to read it again.

I've been thinking about this since I've returned, and so, as of this week I am the happy owner of the Nook eReader, made by Barnes & Noble (similar to Amazon's Kindle).

It uses the eInk technology to display a B&W screen for reading which requires very little power, and has an additional color touch screen below for navigation and keyboard. The Nook is light and portable, easy to read (the eyes do not get tired like when reading from a computer screen), has enough power for over a week of reading and can store thousands of books. It supports all common eBook formats, allows for microSD card for extra storage and even includes WiFi and a web browser (with a little hacking, it is even possible to use it's 3G connectivity in Israel).

This is now my own portable library, and the chances I'll be buying physical books in the futures are getting smaller. There is a huge variety of public and freely downloadable eBooks, while most new books in eBook format are sold for no more than 10$.

There are some nice extras - the Nook also displays images, PDFs (all my important documents are already scanned into PDFs) and plays audio files - which is great, since I love listening to audiobooks and they are a great way to pass the time when you're driving or on a long bus ride. And so, this little gadget will be my paper replacement for the future.

Going Paperless

I've been away for a while, on a long trip abroad. Having returned and finding a lot of free time on my hands I got into the once-in-a-decade "lets organize all my stuff" mood. In the process, I was stumbling onto piles of papers from everywhere I looked - bills and receipts, old paychecks and lecture summaries, diplomas and brochures... So, after throwing away mountains of useless old documents, I've decided to take the next step to avoid this problem in the future.

First - I scanned the remaining important documents and saved them as PDF files. So now I have some 150 scanned docs nicely organized on my computer, and I can go over them quickly and find what I need without rummaging through the papers themselves, which are neatly stacked in some faraway corner. And of course, I have all my important files backed up online - don't we all?

The second step was to stop getting all those papers in the first place. So I visited the websites of those companies who were filling my mailbox, such as the bank and credit card company, and changed the settings to receive all reports and bills online. Gladly, they all offered such an option, as this is clearly a saving for them as well.

Interestingly, soon you might not even have to keep the original documents stacked somewhere, as this proposal by the Justice Department (in Hebrew) will declare copies and scans of documents just as legally valid.