McLarenblog

(This article is currently being updated, not finished.)

After Borders Book Store closed in my immediate area, I longed to visit a book store.  The closest store was Barnes & Noble at the other end of an adjoining city.  I went there with a friend and purchased a Barnes & Noble membership card for $25.  About a month later I entertained buying an e-reader.  My son and I had just purchased a Kindle Fire for my wife as a Christmas gift.  She loves to hold real books in her hand and my son and I did not know how well she would take to holding this weird device.  She took to the games that one can play on the Fire but not so much the books.  She was disappointed in the selection and prices for the e-books being offered.

Promotions came to me from Barnes & Noble to buy a Nook.  I have an iPad and love it to death but it is large and heavy and not that easy to carry around as an e-reader.  I did a lot of research and found that most of the e-reader devices were pretty capable, hard for me to discern compelling reasons to by any one device.  It seemed to me that one would be happy with just about any top brand e-reader.  I may have been wrong about that .  Here are some of my impressions.

• The e-readers seem to me to be just a convenient purchase platform for the company.  In other words, you pay a lot of money for the company to make book offers.  I am paying to have their sales desk put into my hands?
• The cost of the e-books may be cheaper when compared to hard back books but not soft cover.    You would think the e-book versions should be cheaper, but they seldom are for paper back books.
• I purchased the Nook Color because I thought I needed color to read magazines and view color charts and graphs in some publications.  I have a subscription to the print and online versions of the Wall Street Journal.  I can read the Journal on my Android cell phone, my iPad and my laptop.  I can NOT read it on my Nook.  The Nook Color took a dive in my estimation.
• I like non fiction books.  I found that many of the titles I wanted to buy are NOT available from any of the e-book stores (i.e. Google Books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon).

I may have made a mistake.  I should have purchased a Nook Simple Touch for book reading and embraced the Apple iPad for all other purposes, including games, magazine reading and reading newspapers.