Nook’s arrival, Good or Bad?

Booklovers, most of them, will tell you what a pleasure it is to lend a favorite read to a friend—the novel you stayed up all night to get to the end of; the travel book that made you feel as if you yourself were on a train ride through India. For a while it seemed that e-book users were to be denied this pleasure of lending to friends. You could b【小题1】 a book or magazine for your reading device, but you couldn’t lend it out.

But now, with the Nook, the US book chain Barnes and Noble’s response to Amazon’s Kindle, electronic readers will be able to have their l【小题2】 literary enthusiasm pressed on their friends, just like readers of physical books can. You simply email the book from your Nook and your friend can read it for two weeks, using any device with the Barnes and Noble e-book reader software. It’s a big i【小题3】 from previous e-book readers.

The Nook offers other features too. You read in black and white on the main screen, just like with Kindle. The difference is that on the lower part of the device there’s a c【小题4】   touch screen, which allows you to browse through a book or magazine, but goes black when you’re not using it so that you s【小题5】 power.

Another exciting thing about the Nook is that it offers Wi-Fi, arguably a big advance on previous e-book readers. Customers in the United States can use the Internet connection to read whole e-books at Barnes and Noble’s hundreds of bookstores for free. None of Barnes and Noble’s c【小题6】 can come close to this.

But the Nook, ironically, has t【小题7】 out to be a money-loser for Barnes and Noble, or at least a job-loser for Barnes and Noble’s employees. According to Marian Maneker at The Big Money Website, if the Nook is successful it might take sales from the company’s bookstores, eventually forcing their closure and the loss of thousands of jobs.