Nook Color or Ipad???

There are tons of free and low cost apps for the iPad. The number of apps for that platform is amazingly huge and there are usually good choices for anything you could imagine. There are also some more expensive apps that are a really good value for what you get. A great example is iBird Explorer Pro for $20. It’s an entire bird field guide that also has audio bird calls and a search feature where you can put in characteristics you know about a bird and it will narrow down your choices for an identification.

The iPad and Nook both use the same e-book format, ePub. In fact, all of the book readers other than Kindle support that standard. So there should be no differences in free books you can get for either platform.

On the iPad you can also load the free Kindle app to theose books. And the free Bluefire Reader app will handle books from libraries that allow digital book borrowing.

When you try out the devices in the sotre I would recommend trying more than just book reading. Try some web sites that you frequent and see how they look. Maybe try pages on sites that you know have wide designs and lots of information to see how well it’s presented. Move around through several pages to see how reponsive it is.

Play some audio if you care about that so you can see how that works and hear how loud the speakers are. The same goes for video. You might see if the device has some video already on it or you could play something from YouTube.

Try loading a PDF from a web page to see how readable it is. Making a PDF work well is harder than ePub books, which can reflow to the screen width. For a good test document you could go to our web page for something like the Early Modern & Epistles book and use the free sample link to see a PDF with 8.5″ x 11″ pages that has full width tables and such.

I know the iPad can display the full page at a readable size but you’ll probably need to scroll around on a smaller device as you read. So try the scrolling and zooming in on text. Try turning the devices sideways to make the text larger. Then you can decide if the way that works on each device is important to you.

It’s hard to go wrong with either device. The important thing is to try them out and pick the one that meets your needs for the kinds of things you want to do and that works in a way that you find comfortable.