Barnes and Noble -- The Nook's Disappearing Books

The Nook is an amusing gadget, but mine -- this is, of course, a sampling of somewhat less than 100 Nooks -- is unreliable.

When I bought my Nook I decided to download only free books until I found something I really wanted to buy. After all, most of us have the books we really want, and the Nook would be good for travel books, detective stories, easy road-reads, and so on. In the event, I will never purchase a book for the Nook because the free ones have a bad habit of disappearing when wanted, not unlike the sales folks in big-box stores in Beaumont, Texas. Why, then, would I buy a book that might then disappear?

Barnes and Noble's customer service on the 'net and in the Beaumont store are great, and I cannot fault them at all. The problem lies in an ill-tried and clumsy technology, and in gadgets made by the lowest Chinese Communist bidder.

At one point everything I had downloaded was not accessible; the books were only titles on the screen. I went to the store and tried to download them again, and this didn't work either. Finally, the nice B & N staff formed a committee, examined the problem and the machine, and concluded that the only solution was to de-register the Nook and then re-register it.

A critical Why? goes here.

So I spent an hour re-re-downloading my books, some twenty of which wouldn't download again. A problem with this is that the titles still exist, and the only way of getting rid of them is to access one's B & N account on a computer (again, why should this be necessary?), and deleting the non-downloadable titles, one at a time. And this does not always work.

The screen has frozen at least twice, maybe thrice, and while the solution is not demanding -- prying the Nook apart and removing the battery for a few minutes -- why should this be necessary at all?

The e-reader has a great future, and I enjoy downloading obscure, out-of-print books for free. But the Nook is not yet ready. If you buy the gadget, don't trust it.