In this second part of a two-part column, Jenn Northington, general manager of breathe books, Baltimore, Md., continues to write about her adventures with her new Barnes & Noble nook e-reader.
 
Fail #7: Deciding which button to hit when you're doing anything other than reading takes some thought. I noticed this the first time I played with the nook in-store, but I assumed that button-use would make more sense over time. It's actually becoming more difficult. I keep forgetting about the touch screen and trying to use the page-turn buttons to navigate on-screen options, because they are right next to said options and appear to point to things. The touch screen is lovely and does in fact do what it's supposed to do; it's just not intuitively placed. Luckily, instead of sending the device into a tailspin or triggering auto-destruct mode, pushing the wrong buttons does exactly nothing. Hats off to you, designers.
 
Fail #8: For some unknowable reason "Open Audio Player" is always (and I do mean always) an option, no matter which menu screen you're in. I guess they really want you to use that function. Except that I can't figure out why. They aren't selling music (after I noticed this odd design choice, I checked), so I'm lost as to the rationale. Nook, the iPod Slayer? Unlikely at best.
 
Fail #9: The Samples feature is absolutely pointless. I downloaded a sample of Michael Pollan's new Food Rules, and the six pages I got were literally the first six pages of the book: cover page, table of contents, second cover page, copyright information, a threat regarding piracy and the (three-line) dedication page. As nice as it is to know the location of every Penguin Group office in the world (courtesy of the copyright page; I had no idea there was a New Delhi office!), I seriously doubt it will win over any hesitant potential buyers.
 
Fail #10: The magazines & newspapers purchase options are frustratingly vague. Take the New Yorker: Single issue $3.99, Subscription $2.99. Nowhere does it say how much content I am getting for said $2.99. Is it a year? Six months? Three issues? WHAT AM I GETTING FOR MY MONEY? OH GOD PLEASE TELL ME ALREADY!
 
Win #4: The nook syncs beautifully, almost seamlessly, with Adobe Digital Editions. The instructions in the User Guide (once you find it) are exactly correct and surprisingly easy. This means that any PDF you can read in ADE, you can transfer to and read on your nook, including DRM-protected PDFs. Hallelujah! Formatting can be a little wonky, but I honestly don't care as long as I can read e-galleys that were, formerly, only readable on my computer. Publishers are starting to offer more and more digital ARCs, and I for one am thrilled finally to be able to take advantage of them.
 
Fail #11: One of the features I was most excited about was the cross-syncing between nook and the B&N eReader app for iPhone/iPod Touch since, as I have admitted, I do enjoy reading books on my Touch. This feature is lacking in, well, almost every way. Your nook Library is divided into a B&N Library, consisting of books from their store, and My Documents, consisting of everything else. Only the B&N Library syncs with the iPhone account, which means that any other e-books, galleys or files that you put on the nook, stay on the nook. On top of that, apparently only e-books will sync--I couldn't access my subscription to the New Yorker at all. Add insult to injury: books that I already paid for and downloaded on my account had to be unlocked with the entire credit card number from the purchase. I ask you, what's the point of having an account if I have to enter the same information over and over again?
 
Sort-of-Win: The lending feature is okay, which on this curve equals a win. Katherine Fergason of Bunch of Grapes very kindly agreed to be my guinea pig for this feature and notes: "Really very easy on my end. Wait. Spoke too soon." Maybe that should have been the subtitle for this article.... Anyway! You select a book, find the "lend" option (I've already forgotten where I found it and can't seem to refind it), give the e-mail address of the lendee and you're done! All the lendee has to do is a) have a nook or b) have an iPhone/iPod Touch and the B&N eReader app, sign into their B&N Account--hopefully with the same e-mail address that you used to lend the book--and accept the lend by a certain date. And then enter in their credit card information. Really. And god forbid you didn't set up a default credit card when you created your B&N account. If you didn't, you have to go back, create a default card, then download the loaned e-book and then enter your credit card information again. But you can read the book! For the next 14 days, anyway.
 
Fail #12: In what I can only assume is a misguided attempt at verisimilitude, I can't read a book I've loaned to someone else. (Katherine, give me my book back!) Yes, I understand that's how it works in real life, but this is the digital age, baby! Maybe it's something to do with piracy (although for the life of me I can't figure out how that works either). At least my nook tells me very clearly that the book is on loan. Kind of like a virtual "neener neener." Probably designed by whoever wrote the FAQ.
 
Part of me thinks, well, it's new technology, what did I expect? The other part of me replies, BETTER!
 
Verdict: My first interest in e-readers was in their potential to revolutionize the clumsy and often frustrating system of ARC distribution. The nook enables me to participate easily in NetGalley, S&S's GalleyGrab and whatever else publishers do next, most of which involve DRM-protected PDFs that are otherwise unreadable (or at best painfully difficult to upload) on my iPod Touch. So in that sense, a nook is exponentially more convenient than a stack of ARCs. For a reader on the go who wants to have access to a lot of books, a lot of the time, the buying and reading features are user-friendly enough to make this a good investment. One can hope, also, that since it has an OS, B&N will fix some of these problems and push out updates, the way that Apple does for iPhone/iPod or Microsoft does for computers. For the casual reader, however, I can't imagine the frustrations will be worth the pay-off. So unless you're too excited about technology or digital galleys to wait, I'd start saving up for the iPad. I hear it's going to be huge.