Travel Tech: The Guidebook In Your iPhone (Part 2)

In the first installment of “The Guidebook In Your iPhone” I investigated reading Kindle Books from Amazon.com and “iBooks” from Apple on your computer, iPad, iPod, iPhone or other smartphone. But this is not the only ways you can read electronic guidebooks or other publications on your iPhone (a 3GS in my case). Here’s yet another possibility: The Barnes & Noble Nook application.

No Nook Needed

Nook For iPhone As I pointed out last time, you don’t need a Kindle e-reader to read Kindle Books; just download software from Amazon.com to your computer or electronic devices and you’re ready to read on the road. In fact, if you install the software on all of your computing gizmos, you can use any of them to resume reading an e-book exactly where you left off when you last closed it.

Barnes & Noble sells its own e-book reader called the “Nook”, but you don’t need it to read e-books from that bookstore chain, either. As with Kindle Books, Nook books from Barnes & Noble can be read not just on B&N’s own Nook e-reader, but also on the iPod Touch, iPads, Macs, PCs, Blackberry’s, iPhones, and smartphones using Google’s Android operating system.

Setting Up Nook On Your iPhone

Go to Apple’s iTunes App Store and get the “Nook” app for your iPhone Then set up an account on-line with B&N and sign in. If you have previously established an account to shop at the Barnes & Noble Website (or to use it’s now apparently defunct original iPhone e-reader app), just login using the e-mail address and password for that account.

Learning To Use Nook

The first time you use the Nook app on your iPhone you will be led through a brief set of “tutorial” screens that show how the application works. This “how to guide” resides in the Nook Library on your iPhone so you can consult it at any time.

After you run through the tutorial, you will be taken to a screen with these icons: “Shop” (takes you to the B&N on-line store), “Welcome to eBooks” (returns you to the tutorial screens), and some book “covers” (whose typeface was so small that I could only make out the title for one: Little Women) for free Nook books which you can download.

Nook’s Book Reading Features

Like Kindle Books and iBooks, your Nook book returns to where you left off when you re-open it. You can jump directly to your notes and bookmarks, or go to the beginning of a chapter by tapping on the Table of Contents.

You can highlight text and make “marginal” notes on Nook books as you can with Kindle Books and iBooks. Font types, sizes, and colors can be changed with the Nook app. As with iBooks, you can run a Google or Wikipedia search and (at least in some instances) look up words using a built-in dictionary. The Nook app lets you adjust screen brightness and the margins (which seems to have a “marginal” effect on what you see on the screen).

Cross-Platform Reading

What I like best about Kindle Books is that I can read them on my desktop PC, my Windows netbook, or my iPhone and, regardless of what device I use to open an e-book, I’m taken right to the place where I was last reading, and have access to all of my bookmarks, highlighted text, and notes for that book as well.

I was pleased to find that the Nook software works the same way. I downloaded and installed it on both my PC and netbook. I did find that it was somewhat slow to load a book on my computers when I initially opened it; presumably the software was downloading the book to my computer. But the second time I accessed a Nook book it opened quickly.

On my desktop the Nook Library included The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I could not recall if I had obtained that e-book using the original Barnes & Nobles e-reader app (which quit working shortly after I installed it on my iPhone) or if I had downloaded it using the Stanza e-reader on my phone.

I opened the Conan Doyle book on my iPhone, then closed it and reopened it on my desktop using the Nook software I discovered that the Nook wasn’t able to find where I had stopped reading about Sherlock’s exploits using Stanza, although it went right to the place where I had closed the book when I had last read it using the Nook app.

I have not determined if syncing Nook books between your computer and other devices happens automatically. There is a little circular arrow icon at the top right-hand side of the iPhone screen which either refreshes the view or actually re-syncs your e-books across platforms.

Buying Nook Books And Other Merchandise

The Nook app lets you download samples from books before you buy, just as you can with Kindle Books and iBooks. You can also quickly find bestsellers and new releases, purchase gift cards, find a Barnes & Noble store, check on the status of an order, and perform other functions using the “Shop” feature.

The iPhone Nook app also lets you search the Barnes & Noble on-line store for printed books, DVD and Blu-ray disks, Music, “Bargain Books”, “Children’s Books”, “Textbooks”, “Used & Out of Print” books, magazines, calendars, “Home & Gift”, “Toys & Games”, “Video Games.”

Lending Library

One of the features of the Nook app ballyhooed on the Nook promotional page of the Barnes & Noble Website is the ability to lend your e-books to other Nook users for up to 14 days at a time. But there are no buttons, links, or other controls I could find on the Nook iPhone app or on the desktop software that told me how to do so.

I downloaded the 213 page Nook User’s Guide (in .PDF format) to see if I could find information about using the lending function. Here is what I learned:

The LendMe function is in “Beta” mode, so it may not yet be “ready for prime time” and its use could be problematic.
I don’t need to own a Nook e-reader and neither does the person to whom I wish to loan a Nook book. Books can be lent to and from iPhones, i Pads, i Pad Touch devices, Blackberrys, most PCs and Macs, and any device that uses the B&N e-reader application.
I can only lend a Nook book to another Nook e-reader user whose e-mail address has been associated with their Barnes & Noble account.
While my “offer to lend” is pending, or while the book is “on loan” to someone else, I can’t read it nor can I offer to lend it to anyone else.
Apparently the “borrower” must finish reading the lent e-book within 14 days and can’t “renew” the book nor can I lend it to them again.
Not all e-books can be lent. A LendMe “Badge” is supposed to show up next to books downloaded to My Library or available from the eBookstore on the B&N Website that you can loan to another Nook user.
A link in the left-hand column of the B&N Website under “Customer Favorites” takes you to a list of LendMe e-books.
A quick check of “Free e-books” listed on the Website didn’t turn up any marked “LendMe.”

Unfortunately, none of the Nook books I currently own are lendable, and I don’t know if any of my friends are using the Nook e-reader technology, so I have not tried out the LendMe feature yet.

Getting Help With Nook

While the Nook app on your iPhone gives you access to the tutorial screens, there is no “Help” function per se. The “User Guide” on my PCs provides no information on how to use the software.

There is a “Nook” support section on the Barnes & Noble Website’s where you can find answers to FAQs. You can also download the entire Nook user guide or just the “Quick Start Guide”, but most of this information in these manuals seems geared to the Nook e-reader hardware device and not the separate Nook applications used on computers and mobile devices.

Finding Travel Guidebooks With Nook

After clicking on “Shop” and going to the B&N on-line store, I typed “travel” in the “Search” box and came up with 10,715 listings. The top one was Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” (a “hot ticket” item thanks to the recent release of the movie of the same name starring Julia Roberts). This was followed by several destination guidebooks from “iMinds” (a publisher with whom I am not familiar).

Searching for “Travel guidebooks” produced 314 items, including two mystery books in Janet Evanovich’s “Stephanie Plum” series, and several of the “iMinds” guides. The “Refine By” feature let me narrow the search down to categories like “Fiction”, “Non-Fiction”, and “Cookbooks”, but not travel guidebooks.

B&N’s on-line Nook book store sold no guidebooks from Lonely Planet or Rough Guide. Six of Rick Steves’ guidebooks were listed, but not the London book I had purchased in Kindle Book form from Amazon.com.

How Nook Stacks Up

The Barnes & Noble Nook application for computers and smartphones rivals Amazon.com’s similar Kindle Book software for functionality and, like Amazon.com, seems to have far more books available than Apple’s iBook Bookstore. But B&N doesn’t not offer nearly the number of travel guidebooks in electronic form as does Amazon.com.

The “LendMe” function in Nook cannot be used with all e-books and the limitations on lending and borrowing make little sense to me. Still, this is a feature that might appeal to some readers.

Amazon.com and its Kindle e-reading application remain my number one choice. Barnes & Noble’s Nook software comes in second, back a few lengths because of the paucity of travel guidebooks available for it. Apple’s iBooks is a very distant third, well behind the front runners, because of its relatively small number of available titles and lack of cross-platform reading capability.