I ruled out the Sony eReader after reading reviews about it and I thought that the Barnes and Noble Nook would fit the bill for our family better than the other readers. All three readers are in the same price range ($259.00 USD). Mother’s Day was quickly approaching and I wanted the reader to be a gift for my wife. I was still researching and it was the weekend before Mother’s Day and I still had not made a choice. I thought that the Nook was my best choice but I kept waffling. The more that I read, the harder it became to make a decision. Another factor in my decision choice was if I ended up with an eReader, would it handle the kind of files that I used and could Veronica and I swap books once one of us finished the one that we were reading. I had hopes of putting different PDF manuals that I use (camera, flash, dive computer) on the eReader and have them with me wherever I traveled. There are all kinds of problems with PDF files and eReaders but I was sure that I would be able to deal with that.

Finally, I stopped at a Barnes & Noble store on the way home from work and bought a Nook.

The purchasing experience was interesting. The salesperson tried to make me leave with the least amount of money left in my pocket after the purchase. I bought the Nook for $259.00. I knew that Veronica wanted a case to keep the Nook in so I found a very nice one for $29.95 which I thought was quite pricey for what I was buying but I was the one who waited until the last minute. The salesperson said that the cover that I had chosen was very nice but I should really consider the one made from the best leather in the world at only $125.00. I was thinking that this was only half the cost of the Nook. I said “thanks but no thanks.” He didn’t give up there. Next was another cover that had two snaps to seal it closed. That was only $69.95. He got another “thanks but no thanks.” Finally, he gave up and I bought the case for $29.95.

He wasn’t done yet looking to get more of my money. Next was a screen protector. I think by now he was wearing me down and I said “Okay.” I was hoping that I could just pay and get out of there. Nope, he had one more thing up his sleeve – the two year protection plan which covered any kind of damage like dropping it on the floor and having it fall into the water. That was only $59.95. I am not a big fan of extended warranties so much to his chagrin, I said no once more.

I brought the Nook home, unpacked it and started it charging. Like many men that I know, I didn’t bother to read the manual. I felt that there couldn’t be too much to setting this up.  The Nook comes with a 3G capability so that you can connect to Barnes & Noble, buy a book and have it downloaded into your Nook in no time. It also allows for wireless connections to wifi hot spots. I connected it to our home wireless network quite easily.

I charged the device, put on its protective cover, downloaded an eBook for Veronica to read and left it for her to find. She has been using it for a week and a half now and she absolutely loves it. It has turned reading into more of a pleasure than it has ever been for Veronica. She just finished her first two books and is starting another one.

Okay, so she loves it. There  has to be some downsides. Her first complaint was the slow boot up time. Because I had not read the manual, I didn’t realize that you don’t shut down the Nook. When you are done reading, simply close the cover and leave it. It will go into sleep mode in a short period of time and when you want to read again, you simply press the power button located at the top of the Nook and you will be on the page that you were at when you closed the cover.

Before I go any further into other areas that are lacking, I want to point out that there have been some bad reviews of the Nook in the past. Barnes and Noble has been trying to address them with firmware updates. The Nook that I bought came with firmware version 1.2. The newest firmware as of May 8, 2010 is version 1.3. You definitely want to be using that firmware version. You can either get it through your wireless connection with Barnes & Noble or you can download it to a PC and install it by connecting the Nook to a computer and transferring a file. All the instructions are on the B & N download page. I updated using the computer. There are some very nice improvements in the latest firmware. A couple of games have been added (chess & Sudoku). They have added a web browser and now allow you to read a book while in a Barnes & Noble store. The book times out after an hour but that should give you plenty of time to see if it is something that you want to buy.

I was a little surprised at the cost of books. Brand new books that are still in hardcover cost $12.99. The hardcover book is $16.37. I thought that the eBooks would be much less expensive than a printed book. They are not. I went to another site, eBooks.com, and the same book that was $12.99 at B & N is $14.99. At Amazon.com, the book is $12.99. Paperback eBooks are in the $8 to $10 range at Amazon. That is about the cost of a paperback book. I have to be honest when I say that I think that the prices are too high for eBooks. I guess that I can comfort myself in the fact that eBooks help to make the planet greener by using less paper.

I just read about a new eReader coming out through the book store, Borders. It is called the Kobo eReader. It will cost $149.00. That is a price that should bring a lot more people into the eReader world. I also read that Banes & Noble are going to come out with a lite version of the Nook that will sell for $199. I also believe that as more eReaders come on to the market that the price of eBooks should come down.

Another short coming for the Nook is how it handles PDF files. I found a cookbook that I loaded onto Veronica’s Nook. It handled the cover page just fine but the recipe pages are hard to read because there is no zoom function on the nook. I tried a few programs to change the PDF to an eBook but the result wasn’t so great. I don’t know how that same PDF looks when you send the file to Amazon and they convert it for the Kindle. Actually, I really don’t want to have to pay to have PDF files that I purchase converted so that they can be read on an eReader. I have since tried a few more PDF files and some were much better than others. My dive computer book looks pretty good on the Nook.

Next let’s talk about sharing books with another Nook user. The Nook has a lend a book function so that you can lend a book to another person. The shortcoming to it is that the lending feature only lasts for 14 days. If you do not finish the book in that period of time, it just goes away. It is much easier to transfer the book using a computer. When I started writing this, I didn’t have a second Nook to try this with but I do now and it works just fine.

There is one more area that it not portrayed very accurately by Banes & Noble. They state that the battery life on the Nook is ten days. That sounds pretty good but if you read a lot, you are going to find the battery life much less. They base ten days on reading one hour a day, having wifi turned off and having all other settings turned to their minimum values. I have read stories of people getting onto long flights and having their battery depleted before they land. Of course, they may not have fully charged the battery before leaving but you should still be aware that the battery life will be less than stated by B & N. The first thing that I did was turn off the wifi to help maintain battery life. If she needs to download a book, it is just a matter of turning on the wifi. Since Veronica hasn’t had the Nook for very long, I can’t comment on how much life she will get out of a charge. Actually, you can put the Nook into “Airplane Mode” and it will shut down the wifi. A few other suggestions to prolong battery life are to turn off the “Auto Adjust Brightness” setting (under Settings>Display), reduce the touch screen timeout to 10 seconds (under Settings>Display) and you can reduce the touch screen brightness (under Settings>Display>Touch Screen Brightness).

Okay, there are some hassles with the Nook. Am I sorry that I bought it for Veronica? Not even a little. I am watching her now sitting in her recliner enjoying her Nook. I haven’t seen her read at home as much as she has in the last few days for a long time. Adding the slightest enjoyment to her life makes me a happy man.

Will I buy a Nook for myself? I did today (May 15th). I am researching ways to better view PDF files with the Nook. I haven’t found anything easy or that works well all the time but I don’t give up easily. I did find a really nice program to keep track of your books and to change eBooks from one format to another. The program is named Calibre. It is an eBook management program and you can download it free here.

When you first install the program, you choose your eReader so that when you connect your eReader to your computer, you can use the program to send the book to your eReader. It has some great features including downloading meta information about the book and cover images from the web. You can convert eBooks from one file type to another. You can also get it to “Fetch news” from the Internet. Calibre contains an eReader so that you can view your book, magazine or newspaper in an eReader on your computer. It is a well thought out software package and I am glad that I found it. If you connect your Nook to your computer, you can choose a book from the list and click on “Send to Device” and it will put the book into your “My Documents” folder on the Nook.

I have just started reading my first book on the Nook and I am very pleased.

© 2010, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

You can see the list of folders in the left hand window above. To add a folder to the list, you would just right click on the folder in the right hand window and choose “Add to Favorites” and when you wanted to remove a folder (or drive) from the Favorites window on the left hand side, you would right click on the folder (or drive) and choose “Remove from Favorites”.

You could also revert to the operating system dialog by clicking the button (highlighted above) in the lower left hand corner of the box. The operating system dialog would look like the one that is shown below. You could revert to the Adobe Dialog by clicking the “Use Adobe Dialog” button (highlighted below).

I have three different hard dives on my computer that hold photo files. One holds all my raw files and the other two hold my converted Tiff files. On each drive are many subfolders and when I am processing a lot of images, having to navigate to the correct folder every time that I save something is a real pain.

So when Adobe added this item to Photoshop, I was ecstatic. This made my life a whole lot easier. Then along came Adobe Photoshop CS4 and I could not find the “Use Adobe Dialog” button and all of a sudden, my life became more difficult. I hate it when I have something that I like so much and then it it taken away. I recently found out that Adobe removed this feature from Photoshop CS4 because it caused too many compatibility problems.

I started looking for a solution and found that I already had it on my computer but was not using it as it should be used. The great little program that takes up the slack after Adobe dropped the “Use Adobe Dialog” function is free and it is named FileBox eXtender. It is available in a 32 and 64 bit version. The current version as of March 3, 2010 is version 2.00.04.

Installation is a snap and after the program is installed and opened, you will see the following:

The window on the right hand side of the box will not have any entries in it. To add new ones, click on the “New Item” button and navigate to a folder or dive. You will see the following dialog box:

Click on “Browse for a Folder” or “Browse for a File” and navigate to the file, folder or drive that you want to add to the shortcut list. In the example below, I navigated to my F: drive which is where I store my Raw files.

After choosing the target, you can either except the default name in the “Item description” box or you can give it a name of your choosing.

Click “OK’” and it is added to the list. To reorganize the list, you can drag each of the lines into any order that you want. When you are done, click “Hide” on the main screen and you are ready to go. There are many other things that you can do with FileBox eXtender but I am not going to go into them in this blog.

As an example, I have opened a file in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and I am going to save it using the “Save As” menu choice.

To get your folder, file or drive list, clock on the icon of a file folder with a red heart in it and you get the following dialog box:

If the folder, file or drive that you want is not on the list, click on “Configure” and add it to the list. If what you are looking for is on the list, click on the appropriate name and you will be taken directly to that file, folder or drive. What’s great about this feature is that it is available in all of your other programs. Sweet and Easy! I am a happy person once again!

© 2010, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

When you start the program, this is the screen that you will see. I didn’t want to extract jpegs from raw files, I wanted to do a shutter count. In the top menu, next to “Check for Update” is a selection named “Shutter Count”. I clicked on it and got this:

I selected “Run” and came to the following screen:

This is where things got a little wacky for me. I connected my D200 to my laptop with a USB cable and navigated to the compact flash card on the camera. It shows up in the navigation menu as a separate hard drive named D200. It didn’t show any photos. I tried a few times and no luck. Finally, I decided to take the last photo taken with the D200 and transfer it to my Desktop. I then searched for that file:

I selected “Load Image” and this is what I saw:

My D200 camera has 10,822 shutter clicks. That is pretty low considering that a Nikon shutter should last for 100,000 shutter clicks. By the way, this program is free. You can donate to the software designer if you find the program useful.

The second program only works on Jpeg and Tiff files so if you are shooting in Raw, you will have to convert your file to one of those formats. That shouldn’t be a problem because all of us that shoot in Raw convert to Jpeg or Tff anyway. The name of the program is Opanda IExif. It is also a fre program which does have a Pro version that does more than the free version and costs $19.99 USD. What I found out after downloading and installing it was that it did not show the shutter clicks for my Nikon D200 or Nikon D300 jpeg’s. I suppose that it may work with some cameras but it didn’t with mine.

I also read on the web that you can find the number of shutter clicks using Photoshop CS3 or CS4 by opening the file and choosing “File” “File Info” and then “Advanced” and clicking on the Exif Info section. I did not find the shutter clicks there for my Nikon D300 photo.

I found another program named ExifTool by Phil Harvey. This one worked great but understanding how to use it was also a little tough. Actually, I just had to read the “How to Use This Software” directions and all was well. What is it with us guys and directions? I downloaded the “Windows Executable” File (zip file) and extracted it to a directory. There is only one file named “exiftool(-k).exe”. To make this work, move this file to your desktop and then when you want to read the Exif  information (which includes shutter count), drag your file onto the file name on the desktop. You will have a window open like the one below:

You can see that the image count is the same as that obtained using Dr. Chung’s Preview Extractor. I am not sure that this will work with every brand of camera and I have only been looking for tools that would work on Windows and not on a Mac as I don’t own a Mac. If you have software that will work as well, please chime in here. In the meantime, I have found what I needed to help (?) enhance my sale of my mint D200.

© 2010, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.