Much of what separates the Barnes & Noble nook from the Kindle 2 is sheer novelty. I can take or leave the color multi-touch screen, and the size and weight differences are elementary. It is the nook’s subtle additions that set it apart. It is like the folks at Barnes & Noble made a list of everyone’s gripes with the Kindle and then set about correcting them.

To start things off, there is the connectivity. The Kindle comes with Sprint, the nook AT&T – which they peg as being faster but who really cares; the big difference is WiFi, lack of WiFi connectivity is what stops me from buying the Kindle and it is what will make me consider buying the nook. If you don’t live in the U.S. (which I don’t), then you are stuck with something that can only read books.

The SD card slot for removable storage is another sweet feature; especially for major collectors and e-book pirates. Another boon is native PDF support, which makes it stupidly easy to download books from a wide variety of sources (including torrent sites).

The major Kindle gripe that they have dealt with, however, is sharing; the Kindle doesn’t have it, but the nook does, and it supports a range of devices which is even better.

The drawbacks to the nook are few and far between, lack of Word Doc support is annoying and it does not have text-to-speech but other than that Barnes & Noble seem to have covered their bases well and come out with something that trumps the Kindle with features, while costing the same, and kills the Sony and iRex readers on price. I am impressed enough to part with two hundred and fifty-nine hard-earned dollars.

Price: $259

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