Monday November 1, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin
We'd like to welcome a new member to the MPEG-4 family of products – the NOOKcolor. Introduced Tuesday night amidst angelic swirling dervishes at Barnes & Noble's Manhattan Union Square store, this first LCD color ebook reader plays MPEG-4 videos of all stripes both from its Android Web surfer and inside ePub-formatted books and magazines.
Whether or not other ebook reader makers, most prominently Amazon, follow with their own color LCD ebook readers with MPEG-4 video playback capabilities remains to be seen. But NOOKcolor faces two other major challenges: battery life and price.
Make no mistake – NOOKcolor is a fabulous ebook reader, even if its menu-manic interface is a bit daunting. Text jumps off its bright 7-inch LCD screen, contrast and readability impossible to match by any gray monochrome e-ink-based ebook reader. Ebook illustrations, maps, diagrams and photos in their natural color condition are finally worth looking at compared to the powdery Etch-a-Sketch-like 16 layers of gray on the regular Nook and Kindle.
But Barnes & Noble has broken an unspoken agreement between ereader maker and readers.
When the Kindle first came out, book lovers cocked a cynical eyebrow and asked, "Why do we need an electronic book when the real thing never runs out of power?"
In order to allay reader battery-dead-book dread, Amazon used low-voltage electronic ink, enabling Kindle's and other e-ink ebook battery life to be measured in weeks. With battery life a non-issue, Kindle sales took off – Amazon announced not so coincidentally a day before Barnes & Noble's NOOKcolor event that only a month into Q4, Kindle sales already have surpassed last year's Q4 Kindle sales and was selling more ebooks than physical books. Occasional battery recharging has been a perfectly acceptable tradeoff for being able to carry around and access a library of literacy in a less-than-a-pound gadget.
NOOKcolor, however, has eschewed e-ink technology for a full blown color LCD screen, ending up with just an eight-hour reading battery life. By comparison, iPad, with its 9.7-inch screen, can play far more processor demanding video files for 10 hours. And you have to figure WiFi Web surfing will drain NOOKcolor's cell even faster.
With its compromised power life, B&N has re-introduced the original ebook objection – battery worry. Will you be able to read the last few chapters of that John Grisham page-turner before your NOOKcolor dies? That circumstance may prove even more dramatic than the book's plot.
But NOOKcolor is more than an ebook reader. With its Android 2.0 OS, WiFi Web surfing and MPEG-4 video and MP3/AAC music playback capabilities, NOOKcolor has pretenses to be a tablet, which raises a value proposition issue with real tablets.
iPad obviously does nearly everything NOOKcolor does merely lifting its little finger (if an iPad had appendages, a pretty creepy thought) including bright, big(ger) screen LCD ebooking, plus around 300,000 additional leisure and productivity activities, and yet is "only" twice the price as a NOOKcolor ($499 for the 16 GB WiFi iPad; $249 for the 8 GB WiFi NOOKcolor).
Forcing consumers to face both the crippled battery life and the convoluted iPad/NOOKcolor value proposition may keep Amazon and other ebook makers from venturing where B&N has chosen to tread, at least until they see how NOOKcolor does in the market.
