Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight 3 Review - Review 2022

The Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight 3 is a solid piece of hardware for $119.99. Purely on that basis, it'southward a fiddling nicer than its master competitor, the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (also $119.99), and its colour-irresolute front light and physical folio-turn buttons add well to the reading experience. Only ebook readers aren't just hardware: They're hardware plus a service, and Barnes & Noble's software and service offering just doesn't feel competitive. Its store has fewer books, its books have fewer features, and its interface isn't every bit polish as Amazon's or Kobo's. That makes the Nook GlowLight three more of a niche choice for ePub-format book fans rather than an overall winner.

Press the Push button, Flip the Page

The Nook is a familiar-looking eastward-reader. It's a small, light slice of black plastic, at half-dozen.ix past 5.0 by 0.four inches and six.vii ounces (lighter than the seven.2-ounce Paperwhite). The matte back is grippable, but picks up finger grease stains easily. On both sides of the screen, there are physical folio-turn buttons, something the Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo readers lack. The buttons are a lilliputian potent, though; they're not virtually equally smooth every bit the ones on the much more expensive Kindle Oasis. Beneath the screen, the home button is shaped like a lowercase "northward," marking this equally a Nook.

The 300ppi, 1,448-by-1,072 Eastward Ink Carta screen is the same as Amazon uses on its Paperwhite and more premium products, and it'southward very readable. It's slightly higher resolution than the Kobo Aureola Water ($179.99), although the Aureola Water's screen is bigger at 6.8 inches.

The most impressive thing about the Nook is its color-changing "GlowLight." It shifts from a cool blue to a warm yellow, either through user settings or based on the device's internal clock. Amazon's Paperwhite uses a bluish-white light, while the Kobo Aureola H2O and Aureola One both have blue-to-xanthous lights. This is why you're hither: a perfectly restful, outdoor-viewable display with a prissy pale background and crisp black type.

Battery life depends on how much you utilise the light. With heavy use, I got about 300 page turns on a accuse. Barnes & Noble says that with the font low-cal at 10 percent and wireless off, you should be able to get upwardly to i,500 page flips, which feels ambitious. That's about the same battery life as y'all go on the Kindle Paperwhite, though.

The GlowLight three isn't waterproof. If you're worried virtually that, you need the Kobo Aura Water or the Kindle Oasis ($249.99).

Interface and Features

Yous load books into the Nook by buying them from Barnes & Noble's store, or past transferring them via micro USB cable from a PC. The Nook has 6.5GB of free onboard storage. Downloads come via 2.4GHz Wi-Fi.

Operating the Nook for annihilation other than flipping pages is noticeably sluggish. Waking the reader upward and switching modes can frequently take several seconds. The device uses a 1GHz Freescale single-core Cortex-A9 processor and has 512MB of RAM, but I'm not ready to judge whether the problem here is hardware or software.

The Nook supports multiple users on the aforementioned purchase account, and each user has their own set of "shelves" to let you separate, for instance, kids' and adults' books. You can split big libraries into groups. On the home screen, along with a button to go to your shelves, to go to the store, and to resume reading, in that location'due south a push button for Barnes & Noble Readouts, promotional snippets of books you might want to buy.

Within books, the interface is very basic. If you tap on the screen, some menus and a page slider pop up. You tin can become to the table of contents, change to one of half-dozen fonts in a range of sizes, bound to a certain page, search within the volume, or add or refer to highlights and bookmarks. That's about it.

Amazon has a much richer fix of features. In that location'due south X-Ray to help you track characters and themes, and FreeTime to let parents keep an middle on their kids' reading progress. The Kindle Unlimited subscription service supplies an endless stream of (mediocre) books. Kindles back up cellular connections when out of Wi-Fi range (if you buy a cellular model), Audible audiobooks (on some models), text-to-speech, emailing files to load them, and integrated Goodreads recommendations. Kobo has more than fonts and sizes, and Facebook connectivity.

I had a fine time flipping through long reads on the Nook, because most of the fourth dimension, flipping pages is all you need. If you're picking an ebook ecosystem, though, the Nook is conspicuously behind its competitors on features.

Non the World's Biggest Bookstore

I remember when yous could observe anything at a Barnes & Noble. These days, it's hard to even find a Barnes & Noble.

B&N'due south online bookstore falls far brusk of Amazon's. They'll both have the best sellers you lot find at the airport bookstore or on library shelves, but once you dig deeper, B&Due north has holes. A lot of that comes downward to the fact that Amazon is at present a major publisher, and doesn't seem to offer ebooks in not-Kindle formats.

To give some examples, honour-winning nonfiction volume "Evicted" and the whole pop middle grade series "Wings of Burn" are available on both stores. But our editor Jamie Lendino'due south volume "Breakout," near the history of the Atari 800, Hugh Howey's popular "Dust," and Chris Beckett'due south "Daughter of Eden" (all of which I've read recently) are all Kindle-only.

The browsing experience on the Nook also isn't that pleasant, considering the interface is very wearisome. You're oftentimes left staring at 3 "loading" dots for a while, or waiting for images to render.

For library books, the Nook experience is more awkward than the Kindle experience. You have to download books using your PC into the Adobe Digital Editions app and transfer them with a cable. The Adobe app is buggy, and we had trouble getting the Nook to show up on the desktop of ii PCs. With Kindles, libraries just push books through the cloud.

The Nook does take i major advantage over the Kindle: It supports more file formats natively. Specifically, information technology does a blindside-up job with unprotected ePub books, and is able to read PDFs (although the text can be too pocket-size to read, and pinch-to-zoom is unreliable). Kindles require you to convert ePubs and PDFs first, and frequently lose formatting and indexes forth the fashion. If ePub is your primary reading format, the Nook will be a trusty companion.

Kobo'due south east-readers, meanwhile, support even more than formats: non only PDF and ePub, but CBR and CBZ for comics.

Conclusions

The Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight 3 is a good-enough e-reader with some unique features for its toll. Most notably, that colour-changing front lite is notable for $119.99; with Kobo, you need to go up to the $179.99 Aura Water to get that. The screen is also delightfully sharp. Look at the hardware specs, and you're getting some great value for the money here.

So why am I hesitant to recommend this over a Kobo, much less the Paperwhite? The sluggish interface and third-place store selection play a major role. I likewise call up cloud-based library volume delivery crushes having to use the difficult Adobe Digital Editions app. I know, that doesn't matter to yous if your main use is sideloading ePubs. Just I'm making a judgement call that the vast majority of Americans don't e-read by sideloading ePubs.

I'm likewise concerned about Barnes & Noble's corporate wobbliness. While Amazon is a powerhouse and Kobo is owned past Japanese giant Rakuten, B&N has really struggled in the market, endmost stores over the years and most recently firing many full-fourth dimension employees at all of its stores in February. That includes the people doing in-store back up for Nook devices, co-ordinate to a worker's blog post. A auction or major shift in strategy could imperil the Nook shop, making Nooks much less functional.

That means nosotros can give the Nook GlowLight iii a proficient review for its basic reading experience, but not recommend information technology to nigh people. The Kindle Paperwhite remains our Editors' Pick at this cost, and will please the largest amount of users. If y'all prefer ePub books, meanwhile, y'all should spend a little more and go the waterproof Kobo Aura H2o.

Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight iii Specs

Dimensions	vi.9 by 5.0 by 0.4 inches
Weight	6.seven oz
Screen Size	6 inches
Storage Chapters	eight GB
Book Formats	PDF, EPUB

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/migrated-48933-ebook-readers/20955/barnes-noble-nook-glowlight-3-review

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