Nook 1.5 Update review (with idea to help with the Shelves they added)

[The Straight Story]

Nook 1.5 Update review

I want to focus on 2 updates that I see as significant:

1. Page Turns
Super fast now. It appears as though they cache ahead and behind and that when you go forward or back a page it instantly appears and caches the next couple of pages ahead and behind. VERY well done.

2. Shelves. Finally a way to organize your books. But there is a BIG problem with it for some people (like me).

A. You can now create a shelf, example 'Horror' and put your books on it. Before, if you were like me and had about 1200 books on your nook, you had to page through over 100 pages - there was no way to organize them (even if you, as I did, created folders on your laptop and organized the books and copied them over to the Nook, it did not care about the folders and sub folders).

B. Shelves cannot have sub shelves. If you want to break out your books you will have to have shelves like Horror General and Horror Lovecraft.

C. You cannot create Shelves when connected to your computer, you have to do so manually - which leads me to my workaround:

1 - Move all the folders (if you have them) and books from My Documents on the Nook to a folder on your PC, like NookBooks.
2- Create a Shelf, Say Horror LoveCraft on the Nook.
3- Move your Lovecraft books to the Nook
4- Disconnect and while on the Nook move each book to the shelf (one by one, select the book and then the shelf you want it to be on)
5- Create a new shelf for next batch, rinse and repeat.

If you don't have too many books already it won't be too hard to do it all manually while on the nook. But when you have 1200 books and they are spread over multiple categories and sub categories doing it all manually can be hard (ie, you select the first book, try to remember what it was about, and then add it).


--- Overall:
Good update, nice new features and enhancements, but once more Barnes and Nobles has no clue about how many books people might have and how they want to organize them. They could have done it right (and there are hacks to do it right) but they totally dropped the ball on the shelves. Want shelves to work the correct way? Take the folders ALREADY there that people have made on the Nook and let people view just those folders.

All the books I got were free, plus I create my own PDF's using CutePdf and such so that I can store web pages, etc, on the Nook. The only reason I cannot better organize is that someone over at B&N does not get it (Kindle got it, as have other e-readers, but B&N keeps sitting around staring at the walls and acting like they don't know what the heck they are doing).

PS - Update also claims to extend battery life, will see how that goes but as it just came out today I cannot reliably review that yet.

[TreasonousBastard]

1. I've only got a hundred or so books on mine so far, so...

the new shelf thing isn't so bad.

I'm really slow getting the thousands of documents, recipes, saved webpages, and other things stored on my hard drive over to the Nook, so the shelves thing is only one small part of the problem. The smallest, actually.

On edit:

Yeah, the software upgrade overall is good stuff.