State of the Art: Nook and Kindle E-Readers Let There Be More Light - Review

When you’re a tech critic, though, the state of the art changes monthly, if not hourly. You toil over writing a masterpiece, and it winds up having the shelf life of milk.

It could be worse. Instead of writing about gadgets, you could be stuck with an even worse treadmill job: making them.

Pity, for example, the poor slobs at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, locked in an endless battle for e-reader supremacy. They play an annual game of leapfrog that would exhaust frogs.

“I see your new color tablet,” says Barnes & Noble’s Nook team, “and I raise you one higher-resolution screen!”

“Oh, yeah?” says Amazon’s Kindle team. “Well, you know the Nook with a self-illuminated screen that you introduced in April? We have one with a better backlight. Take that!”

That’s a real example. There are two kinds of e-book gadgets. There are those with E Ink screens (cheap, light, thin, no color, long battery life, great to read in bright sunlight, useless in the dark). And there are those with color screens (heavier, thicker, pricier, great to read in low light, tough to read in sunlight).

People who opt for E Ink rave about the “printed” look of the black text on a light gray “page.” They can also be found spending $60 on a case that contains a tiny flip-up flashlight — or just carrying one around on a keychain — so that they can read in bed or in other darkish situations. E Ink is so much like paper, it doesn’t light up on its own.

In April, Barnes & Noble changed the game: it offered an E Ink e-reader whose background lights up with a soft glow, like a digital watch. With the introduction of that model — the efficiently named Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight — the company hacked off one enormous item on the list of E Ink drawbacks. Not only is reading in bed practical, it’s actually superior to reading an actual book, since the gentle glowing screen is nowhere near bright enough to keep a sleeping partner awake.

Your move, Kindle.

Amazon’s response to the B&NNSTGL (now $120) is the new Kindle Paperwhite (same price). The headline here is that the Paperwhite’s lighting is better than the Nook’s.

At top brightness, it’s much brighter. More usefully, its lighting is far more even than the Nook’s, whose edge-mounted lamps can create subtle “hot spots” at the top and bottom of the page, sometimes spilling out from there. How much unevenness depends on how high you’ve turned up the light. But in the hot spots, the black letters of the text show less contrast.

The Kindle Paperwhite has hot spots, too, but only at the bottom edge, where the four low-power LED bulbs sit. (Amazon says that from there, the light is pumped out across the screen through a flattened fiber optic cable.) In the middle of the page, where the text is, the lighting is perfectly even: no low-contrast text areas.

The Kindle’s screen also packs in 212 tiny dots an inch, compared with the Nook’s 167, for visibly sharper text.

Both models have touch screens, which is a real joy; you can tap lightly to turn the page or bring up a panel that controls type size, font choice, margins and line spacing. But on the Kindle’s screen, you can use two fingers. That’s primarily useful when you want to adjust the type size (most of us will, in fact, be over 40 at some point); you can just spread two fingers apart, as on an iPad, without having to open some settings screen.

When viewed side-by-side with the Nook GlowLight, the Paperwhite is much more comfortable to read. You could argue that that’s an important factor in a reading tablet.

The Kindle Paperwhite and Nook are about the same height (4.6 inches), but the Kindle is 0.4 inch narrower and slightly thinner. Thin is great — you can cradle the entire thing in one hand; on the other hand, the Nook’s soft-touch back panel has a gentle sculptured ridge that makes one-handed holding comfortable and secure.

All right, the Paperwhite has superior lighting and sharpness. The Nook, however, has some persuasive counterarguments of its own — starting with the value.