The end of an experiment

As some of you may recall, in January of this year, I commenced an experiment. I purchased a black and white Nook with the intention of using it to download public domain regimental histories and the like from Google Books for use in my various projects. A little over a week later, and on the recommendation of Steve Stanley, I exchanged it for a Nook Color. I then began to experiment with it in the hope that I could make it work the way that I hoped to use it. The experiment proved to be terribly frustrating.

I gave up on the experiment today. No matter what we tried, we were unable to make the thing work with the books being downloaded from Google Books. The things work great with Nook format books, but I could not get it to be usable in any fashion for the Google Books downloads. The one piece of adaptability software we could find took something like five hours to convert a single book, so it was not practical at all for any sort of volume usage. Even after being converted with this software, pages were distorted, or I couldn’t get the whole page on the screen, and I finally grew frustrated and declared the experiment to be a dismal failure.

Instead, I took the plunge tonight and invested in an iPad2. I bought the black one with 64GB of hard drive space and the 3G wireless capacity. As a long-time Mac user, I know that the iPad will work well with PDF’s and that I will be able to use thing precisely as I had hoped to use the Nook Color. And so, the great experiment was a miserable failure, replaced with a much more expensive but far more useful item. I think I will be far less frustrated and far more productive with the iPad than I ever was with the Nook. I will probably end up giving the Nook to my nephew, who likes gadgets and gizmos, and I have just inherited Susan’s used Kindle when she bought the Kindle Touch for her reading pleasure.