In case you missed it, Barnes and Noble quietly unveiled a new Nook Glowlight Plus last week with a 7.8-inch E Ink screen.
It was only available in stores for the first couple days after it was released, and now it’s available to purchase online from B&N’s website for $199 with free shipping.
The new Nook Glowlight Plus has a 7.8-inch E Ink Carta screen with 300 ppi and a frontlight with warm and cool color temperatures.
It’s also waterproof, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack and Bluetooth to listen to B&N podcasts (and probably audiobooks soon).
Other than that it’s pretty much a clone of the 6-inch Nook Glowlight 3, which B&N still sells for $119.
The side bezels are a bit smaller than the ones on the Glowlight 3, but as far as 7.8-inch ereaders go the Glowlight Plus is the largest yet at 211 x 150 x 8.7 mm, with a weight of 279 grams. That’s pretty heavy for a 7.8-inch ereader. By comparison the 8-inch Kobo Forma only weighs 197 grams with its plastic-based E Ink screen.
The new Nook comes with 8GB of storage, with about 6.4GB usable for Nook content and sideloaded content. It supports ePub and PDF formats, including Adobe DRM.
Unfortunately Nooks are rather archaic when it comes to public library support. There’s no wireless option to get ebooks like with Kindles and Kobos; you have to use the old method of using a computer authorized with Adobe Digital Editions to transfer library ebooks to a Nook, and there have been a number of reports of the process not working properly with past Nooks and it’s unlikely to be any different with this new one.
It’s good to see B&N release a new larger Nook, but if the software is as bad as it was on the Glowlight 3 then it’s hardly worth considering if you sideload books. Hopefully they’ve cleaned up some of the issues. Stay tuned for a full review.
Ive used it and the new interface is much faster than the old one. I can’t speak to sideloading with drm. I only sideload stuff for school. For pleasure books I just use the Kindle.
The fabulous IR screen is gone though.
I was hoping that perhaps you were mistaken but I got the new Nook today and you’re right it definitely isn’t IR. 🙁 On the plus side there’s no longer a shadow along the edge from the deeply indented screen to accommodate the IR sensors.
It’s good to see B&N release a new larger Nook, but if the software is as bad as it was on the Glowlight 3 then it’s hardly worth considering if you sideload books.
Exactly so. B&N’s decision to not permit sideloaded books to be put into Nook Glowlight 3’s shelves/collections meant that even though you now had gigabytes to which you could add sideloaded books, you couldn’t readily access them from shelves/collections. Which meant there was no point to adding any more than 20 or so sideloaded books. Previous B&N software and Kindles all permitted adding sideloaded books to collections/shelves.
As further evidence for faulty software from B&N, consider that I lost access on my Glowlight 3 to my B&N-purchased books. I went to a store for advice. The solution was to de-register the Glowlight 3, and re-import. Yes, that was a solution, but that was a solution for a problem that should have never occurred.
I tried it and it worked well. PDF still needs some work, but you can enable developer options and install a PDF app and ES File Explorer to find sideloaded content.
I still have my Nook HD+ to read PDFs, so this would be mostly for ePubs.
There’s no problem finding the content. It gets erased from the shelves the next time you connect to a computer. It’s still on the device and can be found in the library screen but the shelves (collections) will be emptied of any sideloaded content.