Come on Over to My Nook

Merry merry! Hope all your holidays were safe and warm and happy. I got the one thing I requested multiple times, yes, a NOOK! So I thought I would document my struggles, um I mean joy, here for ya'll. It all started well, my physics PHD wielding husband pried the thing open (I had read enough reviews to just hand it to him without even trying myself) and I was off, looking at NYT bestseller lists and magazines I could subscribe to (we pay about $100 for the physical Wall St Journal, can I really get it for $14.99? What's up with that?)

After playing for awhile I decided to let it rest and charge all the way up. I don't want to overtax my nook. And I am not going to even comment on the double entendres, so there. After the kids got to bed I was ready to get more serious but so was my husband (really people, stay focused) so he grabbed the nook to get it configured for our wifi. After registering the nook and downloading the update to the firmware I figured I was ready to go. I am still waiting for a download of the free sample of Evermore by Alyson Noel. It's been queued for 15 minutes now, saying "Will complete shortly" the whole time. Not impressive. Yup, still waiting.

The other interesting thing, I managed to justify this purchase (only to me) on the basis that I have a lot of PDF documents to read for school. Printing them is expensive, not to mention the trees, and my laptop is rather dimly lit making it hard on my old eyes. Voila, I need a Nook. Of course if you have followed any reviews, the formatting of a PDF on the Nook is a total nightmare. It seems this is a publishing issue, not a Nook specific issue. Spouse found a program called Caliber that will convert the PDF (not scanned) to an epub document and it looks spectacular. Score one for the man. There are some bugs with the font conversion but its much better than the alternative. But again, it's limited to digital PDF (one created as a PDF or converted from Powerpoint or Word for instance) not scanned ones. And as my husband says, my Social Studies professors scan this stuff at such low resolution even he can't fix it. (Did I mention my husband is a scientist born and bred?)

So to close, I still don't have a download of my free sample of Evermore, I'm guessing that was 4o minutes at this point. I've got 30 days, right? Maybe I need to get Kindle 2 and put them head to head for the trial period. Wow, that's so not me, I have a hard time even typing it. :)