New E-Book Reader Sheds Light on Every Page

If you intend to buy an e-book reader, here’s a tip: First, spend an evening sitting cross-legged on a lotus leaf, surrounded by incense and sitar music.

Because buying a reader isn’t like buying a car, a DVD player or a hair trimmer. All of those tools are fairly universal. You’re not committing to one brand of gas, one kind of movie or one style of mustache.

No, when you buy an e-reader, you’re committing to that one company’s catalog of books forever, because their book formats are mutually incompatible. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Nook, or a Nook book on a Sony Reader, or a Sony book on an iPad. Once you buy the gadget, you’ve just married its company forever. If you ever want to change brands, you have to give up all the books you’ve ever bought.

What makes this excruciating decision even trickier is that the e-book companies update their wares so often. If you have any doubt, consider the new Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight (or the B&NNSTGL, as people in a hurry call it).


This new $140 e-book reader is a very big deal. Until it came along, there were two kinds of e-reader screens.

First, E Ink screens. This is the kind of screen on most readers. The type looks like crisp black ink on light gray paper: there’s no backlight, no glare, no eyestrain. Not only can you read in direct sunlight, but that’s actually where the print looks best.

Battery life is fantastic, too, since E Ink draws power only when you turn a page. (It works by drawing millions of black particles into a pattern of letters by a brief electronic charge. Once there, there they can stay forever without drawing power.)

But there are downsides to E Ink. There’s no color — it’s black, white and shades of gray. There’s a weird black-white-black flash every few page turns. And above all, E Ink requires external light, just as a regular book does. You can’t read in dim light without a flashlight or something.

(For her 13th birthday, my daughter wanted only one thing: one of those covers for an Amazon Kindle e-reader with a built-in, flip-up light to illuminate the screen, so she could read in low light. It’s a really cool cover, and the little light is on a stalk that’s just the right height and brightness — but I’ll admit that I felt a little stupid buying a $60 cover for an $80 reader.)

Nowadays, you can also buy readers with tabletlike LCD color screens. These readers, like the Nook Color and the Kindle Fire, show full color, making possible comics, magazines, children’s books and games. And they’re self-illuminated, so you can read in the dark.

Unfortunately, their compromises are pretty severe, too. These machines are thicker than E Ink readers, heavier, more expensive ($200) and probably a little too bright for sleeping-spouse reading. And you can’t read in the sun; these screens wash out terribly.

All of that long-winded exposition is your introduction to the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight. Basically, it’s an E Ink screen that self-illuminates. It gives the light gray background of your “page” a gentle glow for nighttime reading, much like the backlight on digital watches.

In theory, this ought to give you the best of all possible reader worlds. You’d have the low price, long battery life, supercrisp text and beach-reading potential of an E Ink screen — married to the self-illuminating bedtime-reading potential of an LCD screen.

Well, guess what? The reality lives up to the theory in every way. The GlowLight Nook offers glorious, clear, peaceful darkened-room reading. The illumination comes on when you press the N button beneath the screen, and detracts nothing from the natural E Ink reading experience. The factory-setting brightness is ideal, but you can make it brighter or dimmer using an on-screen slider.

The actual light “bulbs” are at the very top of the screen; the giveaway is an eight-inch band of brighter light. (You can also see the tiny points of light if you hold the reader perpendicular to your face.) Over the rest of the screen, you might detect extremely slight variations in the evenness of the light, but you’d have to be a card-carrying member of the American Nitpickers’ Association.