Kindle vs Nook
Display
Kindle e-ink technology which do an excellent job of reproducing the look of printed paper. With few exceptions, they're not backlit so you can't read in the dark but you can read them in direct sunlight, which is something you can't do on an LCD screen.
Nook offers an ebook using e-ink technology as well as one with a color, LCD touchscreen. In contrast to the Kindle, the Nook's LCD screen is a bright, colorful, beautiful display.
E-ink technology is the closest you'll get to a real page, and as such, is deemed to be the best type of display for dedicated ebook readers. Both the Kindle and Nook use this technology. But Nook's one upped Kindle in this department with the LCD backlight.
Up till now, the Kindle had a huge advantage over the Nook for readers of "word books," as opposed to books with pictures. If the lighting was even a little bit wonky -- like if a room had windows, or your porch has a sun outside -- the Kindle's e-Ink Pearl screen was far superior to the Nook's backlit display.
With the release of "The All New Nook," these two advantages have evaporated. The Nook will now have an e-Ink Pearl screen with at least as good a resolution as Kindle's. AND it will be a touch screen!
These changes essentially result in the Nook becoming a Kindle with a touch screen. And admit it, you Kindle owners . . . you were poking at your Kindle screen for a good two weeks before you got it through your head that it wasn't going to respond to your advances.
To be honest, if you watch the videos of the New Nook in action (see previous link), the touch screen is not the completely interactive slide, drag, drop and pinch capacitative screens we're used to on our iPads, Androids and tablets. But it will respond to poking. And that's a good thing in my book.
Battery Life & Storage
Kindle's battery life lasts up to 30 days with the wifi turned off. With 2G of internal memory, the Kindle can already carry up to 3,500 books and documents.
Nook's battery life lasts up to 10 days with the wifi turned off. The Nook device can only store up to 1,500 books in its internal memory but then again, it has a microSD slot for added memory if needed.
Battery life is a big factor in an ereader’s performance. The Kindle battery's lasts a up to 30 hours compared to the Nook's battery life of 10 days.
Design & Customization
The Kindle will display .mobi and PDF files. EPub is the industry standard format open to everybody. Amazon's .mobi format is proprietary. But will Kindle learn to read ePub soon? Probably.
Kindle will let you browse the web and search with Google. But it's an emergencies-only feature. It's very cumbersome.
The All New Nook has less on-board memory than the Kindle. But it has an SD slot, so you can expand the memory infinitely. And the Nook is not available in a 3G version. But the $139 Kindle isn't 3G either. (You have to pay $189 for the 3G Kindle.) And who really needs to buy their books where they can't get Wi Fi anyway?
The Nook will display ePub and PDF files.
Nook has no browser, but will let you upload snippets from books to FaceBook directly. Kinda cool.
Native Format Support
Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, and PRC
EPUB (DRM and non-DRM), and PDF
Epub is a widely used format and it's usful to not need to convert books, as the conversion process usually lowers the quality.
Summary
If I had to pick one then I'd go for the Kindle. The Kindle makes the hardware feel invisible and to a large part transforms into a book.
Okay. You're an author. What does this development mean for you?
It means that, if at all possible, you need to get your eBooks decently formatted through PubIt and available on B&N immediately! No Smashwords middle man to cut into your royalties. Since PubIt now accepts .html uploads, you can use the same computer file of your book to upload to both Kindle and Nook. There should now be enough sales on B&N to justify the work to publish your book again through PubIt. I don't think that's true with the iBookstore, or Google Books, or Kobo. At least not yet. You can still use Smashwords for those outlets.
Regardless of whether you prefer to read on the Kindle or the Nook, The All New Nook is great news for authors and will substantially boost sales of our books. I promise!
You can read my original article comparing these items here
Electronics > eReaders
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