Nook for Android (Tablet Edition) One of the Best eBook Reader Android Apps!

by Jonathan Lonczak Jun 7, 2011 2:53 PM – 3 Comments

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Shop over two million books at Barnes & Noble, take your library wherever you go! Barnes & Noble presents NOOK for Android. Now you can access your favorite NOOK Books, magazines and newspapers, right from your Android smartphone or tablet.* Shop over 2 million titles including everything from hot new releases to bestsellers. Plus, get instant access to hundreds of FREE NOOK Books, and sample any NOOK Book for FREE.

Updated with an optimized design for Android Tablets, NOOK for Android lets you customize your reading experience, turn pages with a flick of a finger, and search for words in a dictionary. You can also side load your own ePub files, and it’s the only app with an in-app eBook lending feature. It even comes loaded with 5 free books.

Best of all, you can take all your reading with you, wherever you go. *Newspapers and magazines only available on high resolution Android Tablets

Price: Free

Tested on: Motorola Xoom for Tablet Features, Also used on Thunderbolt, and Samsung Galaxy Tablet
Content Rating: Everyone

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

Extremely large collection of books, magazines, and periodicals from the Barnes and Noble book collection!
Allows you to subscribe and view magazines and newspapers right from your tablet!
Page turning animations while reading ebooks!
Adjustable font size and brightness!
Allows for bookmarks, highlighting, note takings, and earmarking of book pages!
In application book store!
Syncs reading between your smartphone and tablet!

Cons

Book store does not support landscape orientation.
Search button extremely hard to press in book store.
Cannot sign up for new Nook account within application.

Features:

Nook for Android is my favorite e-reading application for my Motorola Xoom. Nook for Android features animated page turning, adjustable fonts, bookmarks, highlights, note taking, and magazine subscriptions. Nook for Android also offers all of the standard features for the Android Nook application for Smartphones.

In order to download books or magazines to read within the Nook application you need to set up a Nook account on the Barnes and Noble Nook website. After setting up a free Nook account you can log in to the application and begin to shop. The Nook application has many different categories that you can search through to find books such as Bestsellers, Currently Trending, Mystery, Nonfiction, Magazines, Etc. You can also search for any book within the Nook shopping environment. I purchased two magazine subscriptions recently which didn’t cost me more than $5 a month. I was extremely impressed with the selection of magazines the store had to offer. Most of the books were priced in the $10-$14 range.

When reading through a book or magazine the Nook application has two modes of display: portrait and landscape view. In portrait mode the application formats the pages of the book to show as much content as possible on one displayed page on your tablet. In landscape view the application breaks down the content from portrait mode in to two pages side by side. I found that with books I preferred to read in landscape mode with the Xoom sitting in a stand in front of me while having breakfast. With magazines I preferred portrait mode because it made the content of each page of the magazine more readable.

While reading through a book in either portrait or landscape mode the Nook application simulates the feel of turning a page in a book. As you turn from page to page in the application the printed page in the application will roll over and turn with you. I personally love this feature and feel like it adds to the authenticity of the book reading experience on an electronic device. Before I had discovered the Nook application I had abandoned the Kindle app in favor of Google Books just to obtain the page turning experience. On a sidenote animated page turns are not displayed while reading a magazine.

Nook for Tablets also allows you to adjust font size and brightness in order to create an optimal reading experience. If you dislike the standard font size you can preview other sizes and pick the size that works the best for you.

: Nook for Android Library

: Nook for Android Portrait View

: Nook for Android Split Page View

: Nook for Android Magazine Subscriptions

: Nook for Android Magazine View 1

: Nook for Android Magazine View 2

: Nook for Android Contents and Bookmarks

: Nook for Android Shopping View

: Nook for Android Shopping Categories

: Nook for Android Font Options

: Nook for Android Options

Usefulness:

Nook for Android is extremely useful for e-reading on the go. The magazine subscription feature allows you to keep up with all of your magazine subscriptions and manage them in one place. By providing all the content to your device electronically you are able to save all ebooks and magazines indefinitely. It also cuts down on the cost of the magazines significantly bring down a subscription to Maximum PC to only $1.99 a month. Nook for Android has an incredibly large library of of books to choose from allowing you to find almost any book you wish in one place.

Ease of Use:

Nook for Android is extremely easy to set up and use. After creating a Nook account on the Barnes and Noble website you are able to do all of your book purchasing from within the application. Nook also allows you to customize font size and brightness to fine tune your device for easy reading. These features combined with bookmarks, note taking, and easy highlighting make Nook for Android extremely easy to use and give the application a lot of extra functionality.

Frequently Used:

I use Nook for Android daily. I lay down my Xoom tablet on the kitchen table in it’s folio stand and pull up a Magazine or a Newspaper and read through it as I have my breakfast. The interface for the Nook application is extremely easy to use and feature rich. Making this application a daily flyer for a frequent reader. With thousands of books, magazines, and newspapers Nook for Android is the best e-reading application I have used to date.

Interface:

The interface for Nook for Android is excellent. It is feature rich and extremely easy to use, allowing for the viewing of all of your reading materials in one place. However, there are two issues I noticed within the interface: the store interface cannot be viewed in landscape mode and the magnifying glass for searches is extremely hard to hit on Honeycomb. Barnes and Noble needs to re-examine the interface for the book store and ensure as good an experience purchasing the books as when reading them. Currently not being able to browse the book store while in landscape is a huge inconvience as is pressing 5 times on the magnifying glass icon with no response.

AndroidTapp.com Rating

AndroidTapp.com Rating! (4.6 out of 5)

Should you Download Nook for Android? Yes! Nook for Android is the best e-reading application I have used on my Motorola Xoom. It gives you the unique animations of Google Books and gives a consistent reading experience with every book you read. Nook for Android also allows you to subscribe to your favorite newspapers and magazines for a lower cost than for the paper edition. The only work this application needs is a few tweaks to the book store interface.

Developer: Barnes and Noble

Tags: Android App, Android Apps, Android Tablet Apps, AndroidTapp.com App Review, Books, E-reading, eBooks, Honeycomb, Motorola XOOM, Motorola XOOM Apps, NOOK for Android, Nook for Android (Tablet Edition), Tablet

Categorised in: Books & Reference

3 Comments

By William in DC on August 13, 2012 at 2:00 pm:

As one of your positives, you say that the Nook App, “Allows for bookmarks, highlighting, note takings, and earmarking of book pages!”.

May you tell me how that is done? I have an Asus Prime tablet and I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that. I just was in a chat with BN customer service and they said that the android app doesn’t allow annotations and markups, which is very dissapointing. How are you doing markups on the android nook app?

Reply
By M.A.DeLuca on August 18, 2012 at 3:42 am:

William, the BN tech rep was as wrong as Grandpa in high heels!

Hold your finger over the first word of the text you want to highlight, then wait until a green box forms around it. Drag over more words to increase the selection. When you’re ready, choose from one of the three icons floating over your selection to highlight, add a note, or look up the selected text. If you’ve selected a region accidentally, just tap the area in green once and it will go away.

Much easier than on the first Nook!

Reply
By beth on January 26, 2013 at 4:47 pm:

Is there any way to actually download a book permanently onto my tablet? I want to be able to log out of Nook and still have the book accessible, not have to either stay logged on or go back to the cloud and get it. Thx.

Reply