Unfortunately on Christmas day I got a nice new traveling case and screen protector, but only a placekeeper for the unit itself, which finally arrived the day that the Apple iPad was launched. Hmm, interesting timing. There's really no comparison, though, between the "whats" and the "whys" of an ebook reader like the Nook and a device like the iPad. The nook is all about simplifying and in some ways enhancing the process of relating to printed material, where the iPad is about the multi-sense world of Web media, with books a nice part of its capabilities but one not necessarily likely to appeal to many of its core Web-raised customers.

The Nook definitely has a leg-up overall on its Amazon Kindle rival, in the sense that it combines both the sophistication of a touch interface with a very simple and enjoyable page-turning experience via its eInk interface. I had my doubts about this combination, but, while not perfect, it works out pretty nicely overall. You can swipe your finger across a row of book, newspaper and magazine titles like you would on a touch-screen phone interface, tap once and start digging in. A second or two after your text is displayed, the color touch interface powers down and you're enjoying crisp eInk text, which only improves its readability in bright daylight. That's a boon when on a beach or in a sunny train or plane seat where moving to a better spot is not an option.

The physical controls of the Nook are bone simple. An "on" button on the top of the unit, a bar between the eInk display and the color touch display that activates the touch screen, and page-turning buttons on either side of the screen. The page-turning buttons are just about perfect and a joy to use. Each page-turning button has a pinhole-sized protrusion in its middle, which makes it a no-eyes procedure to get your fingers in the right place, and no edges. It's a seamless case, so there's no place for dirt, dust or sand to get into the controls or to spoil the smooth look of the unit. Best of all, the buttons are repeated on either side - a huge plus for righty-lefty usability and for when you get in those wierd positions that feel great put that put your hands at odd angles.

Downloads of new and updated materials are smooth and effortless, with simple and well-designed procedures. It's a no-brainer to use for all of its basic functions. Searching the Barnes and Noble store is simple and easy via a touch keyboard, which overall is no worse than Kindle's weird Chiclet-style physical keyboard but has rather slow typing response and an early-release Android look and feel that leaves something to be desired compared to the Android-based Nexus One phone that hangs next to me most of the time. Barnes and Noble also provides its own content via "The Daily," a daily newsletter that includes a listing of your latest content downloads. You can accelerate download performance by powering up your Nook on your local wireless network, but it will drain your batteries fairly rapidly. Without a wireless LAN connection or a lot of use of the color display, your batteries can last for days, typically, since the eInk display is not powered once a page is displayed.

While I am certainly open to reading book content on powered displays, I really like this "off" nature of eInk. After a day of staring into backlit computer and phone displays, there's an "unplugged" aspect to the Nook that fits the nature of book reading nicely. Reading books is about sharing some "quality time" with the thoughts of another person. The simplicity of the Nook encourages me to tune out many of my typical daily electronic distractions and to focus on one relationship. Want Web browsing? Go to your PC or phone, please. The only other significant function of the Nook is its ability to play downloaded music, which is a nice complement to reading, if I am willing to tax the batteries a bit. Downloading tunes from a PC is easy via the Nook's standard USB cable, which doubles as the charging cord when plugged into a special AC converter. Economy of design and purpose is the theme with Nook, and overall it delivers on that theme well.

However, the Nook is far from perfect. The delay in getting this unit to market was doubtless getting some of the product development kinks out, some of which still shine through. The most glaring problem with the Nook is its overall performance. Loading large books for reading can take several seconds in many instances, and some large ebooks did not load at all (possibly due to being formatted an older proprietary format not compatible with Nook). Page-turning is quick and smooth enough and bookmarking functions simple enough, but the bookmarks themselves cannot be given easy-to-use human names; you're stuck with a geekish, URL-like name based on chapter numbers that is hard to understand. At times it seems that bookmarks were not being saved. The note-taking capability on the Nook is decent but nominal at best, not something that's likely to satisfy a real student or scribbler often. You can bump up font sizes in the eInk display, but there's only three settings overall for font sizes. An extra-large font setting would be nice for those days when your eyes have had far too much work. Combine these rough spots with the touch keyboard issues, and it's a fair bet that the Nook needs a newer version of Android ASAP to improve performance and a few interface tweaks to boot.

And while the online store interface is smooth and features millions of books from Google Books, Barnes and Noble's own ebook title offerings are still a little bit thin; you'll get most major titles, but don't expect too much peripheral content beyond Google's offerings. Some of the ecommerce for newspapers and magazines is still a little rough also. The online store, for example, lists The New York Times as a $13.99 subscription. For, what, a month? A year? It doesn't say. The subscription provides only a subset of NYT information, which is a bit annoying, but you get at least the highlighted stories that you're likely to want to spend time with in an "unplugged" mode on the Nook.

Finally there's the color touch display, which feels comfortable to use if you're used to touch-screen phones and is generally a pleasure to use, with easy-to-use menus and features that are well-designed overall. The main annoyance here, though, is that after a day of touching the screen of my Nexus One, it feels kind of awkward to look at content in the eInk display that's controlled in the touch display below it. A full-touch display such as in Plastic Logic's new Que document reader would be ideal, but I am not interested in hauling that much hardware around. A Nook slips comfortably into my parka pocket and is not hogging up any significant space on the coffee table next to my favorite reading chair. And again, since book-reading is about getting into the words more than fiddling with features, I am willing to live with the compromise.

I am not really sure that you can call the Nook clearly superior to the Amazon Kindle as a machine, but it's definitely a sleeker and more flexible unit overall with better design and more potential for improvement via its Android underpinnings, as well as more potential to get your content to play nicely in other ebook readers via its use of the ePub formatting standard. I was unable to test out the book-sharing feature yet with another Nook user, but this is certainly an important first that deserves at least a nod of appreciation for the many efforts that Barnes and Noble has put in to replicating some of the most important parts of the book-reading experience. Nook's titles are a little pricier than those found in the Kindle store, but that's a small price to pay for the ability to use content on other ePub-compatible readers. Lock-in to the Kindle system is the price to pay for it's cheaper titles, a price that I am not willing to pay.

And I suppose that's the point of the Nook at the end of the day. It's a great little reader that will allow one to prepare for any number of great new ebook-displaying products that will be coming out in the years ahead. With the Kindle, or, for that matter, materials on the iPad purchased via Apple's online store, you're likely to have a more restricted range of technology options moving forward. It's not clear that standalone ebook readers will be with us much longer, but for those wanting simple functionality in a rugged unit with great battery life that will be highly usable in any number of conditions that would be daunting to many advanced display units, the Nook offers a good reading experience and the ability to escape without hauling around a pound of books - or Jeff Bezos' business model hangups, either. That's good enough for me today, at least.

As much as Kindle has been hailed as a breakthrough for eBooks, I do think that Nook will be a far greater breakthrough for the average book reader and for book publishers and retailers. The Kindle was a nifty piece of breakthrough technology, but it did little to improve the lot of publishers looking at dwindling margins and nothing to help book retailers who are able to shoot cannons through their stores oftentimes without hitting a customer. Nook is well thought-out through and through from a technology standpoint, a customer standpoint and a retailing standpoint.

First, the gizmo itself, which will be available for sale in a few weeks. It uses eInk display technology for the book content, as does Kindle, and it can download books via wireless connections like its Amazon brethren. It has access to millions of books, a convenient online store, and tons of storage and battery life. But this is where the stories of these two devices begin to diverge. Where the Kindle is a completely proprietary platform, the Nook is based on Google's up-and-coming Android operating system for mobile devices, which ties it in immediately with dozens of other Android-enabled devices hitting the marketplace this fall and next year. Barnes and Noble sees clearly that proprietary devices are not going to be a viable barrier to entry when devices based on open source software and Web standards are setting the pace for electronic content access. Using Android enables the Nook to have a slick touch-sensitive color display in addition to the eInk text display that allows for book covers and other attractive graphics to be displayed. Instead of waiting for eInk to solve the color display problem, this is a simple and useful solution that opens up the Nook to other Web functionality and slicker feature navigation more effectively.

Behind the hardware and software is wireless connectivity both for wifi hot spots and for broadband wireless Web networks, a two-fer combination that bests Amazon broadband-only access but also opens up interesting possibilities for retailers. Nook owners who are visiting Barnes & Noble stores will be able to read books via Nook in their stores for free. What a great way to attract people to their retail outlets - and, eventually, what a great way to transition to site-licensing free content access on a subscription basis via affiliates such as high-end coffee shops, university and community libraries and so on once print-on-demand services can be packaged by Barnes and Noble more effectively. Having the right physical context for content remains a winning strategy for content packaging, and Nook's marketing strategy promises to get the 'where" of content right.

Nook also gets many of the "hows" of book content right. Purchasers of eBooks can use Nook to share a book with other people for up to fourteen days and will be able to mark them up with personal notes. Lending can be enabled across both the Nook itself and other portable devices enabled for ePub-formatted eBooks. This also opens up Nooks for library books using the ePub format, in addition to PDF-formatted eBooks that are popular on the Web - and not supported at this time by Kindles. The combination of these features finally offers readers the kind of usability for eBooks that they have been used to having as print readers in an electronic format. Instead of making the hardware and software artificial barriers to a full experience, Barnes and Noble has embraced the experience - and, in the process, has enabled the Nook to be a much more "must-have" place to consume and share content.

Finally, the Nook comes in at a comfy $259 price, twenty dollars less than the current price for the original-size Kindle while offering a display as large as the Kindle2 model. For a fully wireless-enabled device, this will give the Nook a strong advantage going into the holiday season in a lean year - and strong traffic in both their online outlets and retail stores. And while I can't vouch for the hands-on experience, the look of the unit promises to be at least as rewarding as the Kindle. Lacking a physical keyboard, one assumes that the Nook will make use of the Android software-managed touch keyboard capabilities, which, while not an ideal interface, cannot be worse than the amazingly awkward keyboard on Kindles.

So let's see. Great interface, great physical package, great rights management, standardized electronic format, use and share content the way book readers like to, good reasons to visit their retail outlets, go-anywhere networking, Android compatibility - yep, I'd say that Barnes and Noble has just leaped into the center of the new-hotness race for electronic content consumption. I think that it's safe to say that Barnes and Noble is poised to become a major player in electronic book retailing with a device and a marketing strategy that is likely to heat up the book services race to a raging boil. But don't count out Amazon yet - especially with their recent efforts to re-invent the business of local retail delivery. Local contexts is where the money is in content delivery, and both Amazon and Barnes and Noble will have a shot at new approaches to local markets in the years ahead. As for me, well, if a Nook showed up in my holiday stocking, I won't be thinking that it resembles a lump of coal.

This doesn't mean that there aren't good efforts being applied to these improved stabs at eBooks. The new Barnes & Noble eBook store includes lots of state-of-the-art best practices, including easily downloaded reading software for PCs, Macs, Blackberries and iPhones, a decent offering of current commercial titles and access to free eBooks from the Google Books online archive, as well as a smattering of classics pre-loaded into their eBook reader. A forthcoming eBook reading unit from Plastic Logic will enable Barnes & Noble to have its own little toy for eBook enthusiasts, but wisely they didn't bother to wait for this hardware to show up before launching its attractive and easy-to-use store for existing electronic platforms. As they go to pains to point out in their online orientation materials, they want it make it as easy as possible for people to buy and download eBooks using whatever device people want to use to absorb their attention.

While it's good that Barnes & Noble is offering alternatives to eBooks and a very consumer-friendly approach to their promotion, the broader truth is that the book industry has gained very little from eBooks thus far in taking on their biggest competitive challenge: the Web. If, after more than a decade of Web access to books, the entire book industry can only garner USD 323 million worldwide from a medium that reaches more than 1.4 billion people around the world, one wonders how projections predicting USD 9 billion in eBook sales by 2013 can represent real growth and new markets as opposed to a more probable contraction of overall book revenues as book sales to dwindling audiences transfer to online destinations.

There are many signs that the book industry is becoming more savvy about rethinking their role in publishing and beginning to think of themselves as being able to promote talented authors as assets in many media, but these are baby steps in the face of a Web that has already completely rethought how people can profit from expressing themselves to audiences. As nice as the Barnes and Noble eBook store may be, its level of education and assurance seems to be aimed at people who have very little confidence with using online content. One would think that book publishers would become far more aggressive in thinking about how to engage the most aggressive online content producers and users, capturing their energy and interests - and disposable income - more effectively. Certainly ensuring compatibility with iPhones and Blackberries are a step towards that audience, but the relatively inflexible eBook reader software that packages most eBook offerings on these platforms seems doomed to make books an afterthought rather than a primary focus of aggressive content users.

What publishers should do is to focus far more aggressively on packaging that will integrate book content into personal publishing lifestyles far more aggressively. APIs that facilitate applications development to extend eBook capabilities, collaborative reading, bookmarking, linking, user-generated content and other extensions into the real-time generation of content consumers and producers are essential developments to bring eBooks into the stream of attention that they really deserve. Serving audiences is the real objective of publishing - not generating units of production that may or may not deliver full value to a given audience. Creating services that keep people who are today's greatest content purchase influencers - digitally literate readers - in a position to recommend and amplify the value of a wide variety of book-oriented content and services will take far more than locked-down reading software that operates in a vacuum. These types of services are surfacing in the hands of innovative online companies, but as to where that leaves mainstream book publishers and retailers remains to be seen.