Robert J. Sawyer

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer

Archive for the 'nook' Category

Fingering your nook

Monday, March 1st, 2010

A suggestion for Barnes and Noble re the nook ebook-reading device: The very first Palm Pilot going back all the way to 1996 and the original Rocket eBook from 1998 allowed you to do handwriting recognition (on Palms, using the Graffiti or Graffiti 2 system, the former of which used simplified characters, the latter of […]

B&N nook: There’s no justification for this!

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

It’s bad enough that the Barnes & Noble nook forces text to be fully justified left and right, whether the user wants that or not, but it does an atrocious job of producing that justification — among the worst I’ve ever seen on any e-reading device (and I’ve been using such devices for nine years […]

YouTube video of my ebook reader collection

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

My first-ever YouTube video, recorded Saturday, February 20, 2010: a survey of nine different devices I’ve used over the years to read ebooks. “You’re looking at in aggregate at about $3,000 worth of ebook-reading hardware here, and my own personal use almost nine years now of using devices to read ebooks. I’m an absolute convert […]

The scandalous state of ebooks

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

An email I received this morning from my colleague Jamie Todd Rubin: I ran into the same problem with the Kindle that you reported with the Nook regarding hyphenation. They implement full justification without adherence to any hyphenation rules and that makes some lines look awkward (4 words, widely spaced). The other thing I’ve noticed, […]

nook suggestion: swap page buttons

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

I sent this suggestion to Barnes and Noble tech support today, and posted it on the nook discussion forum: To my way of thinking, the page-forward and page-backward buttons are in the reverse of where they should be, given the weight and design of the nook. If you hold the nook with your thumbs over […]

A nook of the north!

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Last weekend, in Chicago, I bought a Barnes & Noble nook ebook reader. Since they’re not for sale in Canada, I probably have one of the very few units in all of Canada now — a nook of the north! (Yes, it was worth the US$259, just to get to make that pun.) My initial […]