nook and crannies: Icarus tests BN’s e-reader

…As only Icarus can give you.

Thanks to my UPS delivery person, who braved 4-inch snow and blistering cold, I have been the owner of a nook since 4:12pm Wednesday, and I have been putting it through its paces.  This is my report… not so much a review as it is a collection of real world usage experiences, image quality impressions, format testing, and some notes on making e-comics for the nook that I hope will be helpful to other readers, publishers, and creators, rather than merely showcase my inept understanding of ebook formats and xhtml scripting.

I. Hardware set up and first impressions

From the moment you hold the stylishly minimalist packaging and feel its burlap-like texture, you’d know that BN have done their homework… or copied their homework from Apple is more like it.  nook is a handsome device, and it has the presentation to match.  However, the actual contents of the package is rather bare-bones.  Along with the reader, you’ll also get a USB wire for transferring files, and an AC adapter that connects to the USB, but that’s it.  Considering it’s a $270 investment (tax included), I feel they should have given us first-genners something extra; a pair of headphones, a protective cover for the screen, or even a microfiber cloth to keep the glossy facade clean and shiny would have been much appreciated.  And you will need a cleaning cloth, considering that most inputs are handled through the nook’s much vaunted touch screen.  (Cloths for photo lenses would be appropriate.)

The power button is located at the top, and two sets of page forward/back buttons flank the device.  There are no other buttons to be found, making for a very sleek form factor.  At the bottom are the audio and USB inputs, plus an LED to indicate charging.

The backside of the nook is made of a flexible plastic.  Removing it reveals the battery and a slot for a microSD card.  (The one I’m using is 7.41 gigs; the maximum is ~16, I believe.)  The back cover is secured to the nook with clips instead of screws, so removal and replacement was very easy, albeit a little stress-inducing as the clips snap and pop, and fear of the plastic ripping or cracking hangs in your mind.

The nook took just over half a minute to start up (you can put the device into sleep mode instead of turning it off, so you won’t run into this often… except when it crashes).  The first thing it asks you to do is to sync it with your BN account.  After that, you can set up connection to your home wireless, name your device, etc.

Tapping on the “n” brings up a collection of choices on the touch screen.

Scrolling in the touch menu is achieved with sweeping motions, like the iPhone (i.e. it’s like playing a shooter game with inverted mouse view; to scroll down, you sweep from bottom to top).  There’s a learning curve to sweeping efficiently.  To scroll through long lists quickly, the motion needs to be fast, and the fingertip should lift off the surface.  For navigating fields that appear on the e-ink screen, the touch screen provides virtual up and down arrow keys.  Typing on the tiny screen was better and more accurate than I expected, although it certainly wasn’t a cakewalk when I had to enter my 20+ character WPA password.  I actually would have liked a DS-like stylus in this case, but the advantage of a capacitive touch screen like the nook’s is that you can wipe down the screen with a cloth without setting it off.

The library came with a copy of Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (a deliberate bit of wishful thinking by BN, but I would have preferred Outliers).  A nook “tour” and user manual can be found in the “my documents” menu.  I spent only a few brief moments with Tipping Point and Dracula, a free download from BN/Google; I already have both in dead-tree format, and text-reading is not the focus of this article, so I quickly moved on.  But rest assured there are note taking, book marking, and chapter skipping functions, all of which you can no doubt read about in other reviews.  Me, I’m here for the porno comics.

Oh, and most important of all… the nook is a great bathroom companion.  Been there, done that, loved it.

A word on speed: for text, the e-ink screen refresh takes just under a second most of the time, up to two occasionally, and the touch screen has a lag of a quarter to half a second, but I think the sluggishness noted by early reviews was either exaggerated, or alleviated in this true retail release nook.  The screen did suffer from incomplete refresh initially (i.e. remnants of the previous page remain faintly in the background), but that seemed to go away after a few minutes of use/warming up.  Books have an initial “formatting” time of 5 to 10 seconds, which is perfectly within my patience threshold.  However, the nook is buggy.  I’ve had the device inexplicably slow down, lock up, and on one occasion it even emitted an audible, terse buzz, as if I had touched it inappropriately, before it shut down.  This baby demands to be treated right.

II. File structure and transferring files

The nook is plug-n-play, requiring no additional software on the PC.  File transfer rate to the internal memory seems to hover around 1.5mb/sec, while I may get more than twice that speed from the microSD.  That’s according to Windows, anyway… both feel a little faster than that.

nook has a fixed file structure, which you can see as a plug-in drive (like a camera) once connected to your PC. In order for nook to read files properly, they have to be in the right folder.  PDF and EPUB should go in your documents folder, mp3 in music, while images should be in wallpaper or screensaver.  Books downloaded from your BN account are stored in My BN Downloads.

Now, here’s where things get a little tricky… if you have a microSD installed, that will appear as a separate drive, without a file structure.  You can create any folder you want, but the nook will ignore them unless they have the same name as the folders in the internal memory (a shame, considering my $60 DVD player has better folder-browsing support).  PDF and EPUB files can be copied directly to any location on this drive, and the nook will recognize them.  However, images will not be accessible unless you create a corresponding “my wallpaper/screensaver” folder on this drive.

III. Comics reading: Raw Images

Now on to the good stuff.  For the first test, I imported a JPEG image.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

The image shown here is 900 x 1275 pixels, meaning what you’re seeing here is an image natively resampled by nook.  And the quality is quite decent, although there are still some graphic anomalies here and there, the very same kind you’d experience when resizing images on your computer screen.  The nook screen is 600 x 800 pixels, but not all of the screen real estate is available to images.  For best quality, the image should be bi-cubic resampled to the actual maximum allowable pixel size in a proper image program.  Since nook follows the Epub standard, the aspect ratio of the image should be 9 x 11.  But based on later testing, the nook screen seems to allow a little bit more vertical space.  So until BN gives us the technical specs, we won’t know for sure.)  But I do want to make note of this: images that are within nook’s screen size look better on the e-ink screen than they do on your computer screen.  I’m not sure why this is.  Perhaps it’s because it’s not back-lit, or it may be an illusion due the the lower contrast (the screen is grayish instead of white, reminiscent of an Etch-a-Sketch, which ironically gives manga an authentic cheap newsprint flavor).  Whatever it is, images look smoother than they should, and JPEG compression artifacts are not nearly as noticeable.  This was my impression of the Kindle when I first saw it as well, which is not surprising given that the e-ink screens of both devices were made by the same Taiwanese manufacturer.

There are two huge problems limiting the nook’s use as an image viewer, however.  First is the lack of zoom.  As I mentioned, the image I used for this test was 900 x 1275… everything is very readable at its native size, but it was downsampled to fit the nook screen.  With no way to zoom, all the extra detail in the image was essentially lost, and much of the text was simply too small to read.  This problem afflicts PDF and EPUB as well.

The second, far greater issue (and you may have figured it out when I told you that images had to be in the wallpaper folder) is that the nook has no true image viewing mode.  JPEG and PNG are only displayed as the screensaver or wallpaper.  You cannot cycle through them as you would the pages of a book.  This is a big software shortcoming, although it’s debatable whether it’s an intentional oversight or not.  Until the nook becomes an open development platform (how much you want to bet a CBZ/CBR viewer would be among the first apps to get developed?) and user file hierarchy is enabled, raw comics will have to be converted to PDF or EPUB/PDB for a readable experience.

IV. Comics reading: PDF

(Edit: I’ve learned several things about nook PDF display that has completely changed my original assessment below.  Please check this page for updates.  The information here is outdated.)

For this test, I loaded up our Comic AG Digital issues, the exact same ones you can download from this site right now.

As you can see, the image suffers significant distortions, and the lettering is missing.

Well, the bad news is that shapes in PDF are not supported by nook, which uses Adobe Reader for Mobile.  At Icarus, we do all of our lettering within Photoshop, which is not a true text layout program.  When exported to PDF, fonts are not embedded, but saved as shapes, which the nook does not seem able to render, although it knows they’re there.

But there’s worse news… nook does not respect complex document layout in PDF, specifically multiple images and font elements layered over each other.  Everything is reflowed separately, which completely negates any reason for using PDF for comics.

Lastly, as apparent by the horrendous amount of moire in the above picture, the resampling quality of PDF does not match that for raw images, and I’m at a loss to explain why this is.  Images in PDF are actually saved in JPEG or PNG format… in fact, the pages in Comic AG Digital are also 900 x 1275 pixels, same as the image I used in the JPEG test.  But for whatever reason, resizing the PDF to fit the screen did not go as smoothly. This isn’t really a huge knock against the nook, however, as this is a common problem and expected.  After reformatting the PDF to remove fonts, shapes, and downsample images to 494 x 700 (erring at the small end), the results looked very good.

There is one additional ray of consolation… the nook does render embedded fonts correctly. But as far as PDF for comics, the nook is somewhat of a disappointment.  You get none of the advantages usually associated with the format.  And unlike the situation with raw images, this might not improve with the current generation, as processing power is the likely limiter (just think about how slowly Adobe Reader runs on some older desktops).

V. Comics reading: Epub, and working with Calibre

The first Epub I tested out contained 900 x 1275 images.  Just like the PDF, when images were rescaled to fit by the nook, there were massive artifacts and moire.  And again, once the files were replaced with images closer to nook’s natural screen size so that rescaling wasn’t necessary, the problem largely went away.  Qualitatively, there should be no difference between PDF and Epub if both have properly-sized images.  However, Epub gets a slight edge in terms of file size.

Creating these Epub files, though, requires a bit more work than the other options…

Epub can be thought of as a webpage.  The scripting language is xhtml.  Every comic page needs its own corresponding xhtml file.  If you’re an expert at this stuff, and not afraid of tedious work, you could whip up an e-book with Wordpad.  I’m a noob who’s deathly afraid of tedium, so I created my files using Calibre.  But there was still some editing I had to accomplish manually.  And I ran into two problems: Calibre was resampling the images (which I didn’t want; I’ll explain this later), and when using the default output profile for Epub, the top and bottom of the images were showing up cropped on the nook.

But first, a little about the conversion process itself.  Calibre can automatically convert a CBZ file to Epub with a few clicks of the mouse, and it has optimal settings for a variety of e-readers.  For those who don’t know, CBZ is simply a renamed zip file of the entire comic as individual JPEG, GIF, or PNG images, ordered by file name (if you need to batch rename files, I’d recommend Irfanview).  Epub itself is also a renamed zip file, containing all the images, xhtml, stylesheet, and metadata for the book.  So, in order to manually modify your Epub (or if you just want to learn the underlying structure), you simply rename the extension to zip, unzip all the files, edit them, then zip them back up.  For this demonstration, here are the contents of Comic AG Digital issue 4 in Epub format:

And here’s the source in page_1.xhtml, as it appears in Wordpad:

<?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’utf-8′?>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<title>Page #1</title>
<meta content=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; charset=utf-8″ http-equiv=”Content-Type”/><link href=”stylesheet.css” type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet”/><style type=”text/css”>
@page { margin-bottom: 0.000000pt; margin-top: 0.000000pt; }</style></head>
<body>
<div>
<img src=”comic_ag_digital_005_001.jpg” alt=”comic page #1″/>
</div>
</body>
</html>

You can edit these files, or the stylesheet, to change how the book appears.  As I mentioned earlier, when using the default output profile for Epub, the images appeared chopped off on top and bottom when viewed on the nook, because they were taller than the screen.  Calibre resized the images to fit the width, but exceeded the nook’s vertical resolution.  One way to solve this problem is to manually edit the xhtml files to fit the image to screen vertically as one would do on a web page (edits in bold):

<img src=”comic_ag_digital_005_001.jpg” alt=”comic page #1″ style=”height: 100%“/>

After doing this to all 108 xhtml files (but not the titlepage.xhtml, which already had this style tag), the images showed up correctly on the nook, but suffered from the resampling.

The other solution, and the better one imo, is to use proper proportions from the beginning. You can either change the proportion of all your images to a factor of 9 x 11 before beginning the Calibre conversion process, or you can resample the images to 584 x 714 pixels in Photoshop (the method I prefer), then plug them back into the Epub.  By avoiding any resampling on the nook, this will yield the best visual quality.

VI. Manga on E-readers, and final thoughts

Now that nook and Kindle books are also compatible with PCs and other devices which may or may not have better resolution than the e-readers or have zooming capabilities, comic publishers and creators face a unique dilemma… should image resolution match the nook and Kindle, or be kept high to provide those reading on other devices the best possible experience?  I would like to say the latter, since there are more computer users than nook or Kindle owners out there, but on the relatively small screens of nook and Kindle, every last drop of quality counts.  So images should be formatted to appear best on those screens.  This underscores the importance of reaching out to as many platforms as possible, and optimizing for each.  There will not be a one-size-fits-all solution.

As for whether the nook is a good manga reader… well, that’s not what we should be asking.  The question is whether publishers will take the time to consider the nook’s advantages and limitations, and format manga properly for it.  This is true with any other device (for nook and Kindle, this might mean breaking down manga into individual panels.  An imperfect solution, but probably the best one at the moment).  Unfortunately, as it is now, many publishers don’t even optimize manga for viewing on their own websites, with incorrect trims, horrible moire, and illegible text.  I hate to admit this, but as a whole, manga pubs are still far behind their illicit online counterparts when it comes to providing quality scans.  Many of the comics and manga I downloaded from Amazon and BN were simply atrocious, unreadable blobs.  Good content makes for a successful platform.  Right now it’s the publishers that need to improve, and they could start by actually reading their own e-books on a nook (or Kindle, or iPhone, or PSP) before haphazardly tossing them online in hope of making a quick buck.

So, is the nook worth the hype?  Sure, if you like reading and want to look stylish while doing it… nook is unquestionably a sexy little thing.  But if you really want to know if it’s good for comics/manga, well, for my fellow nookerinos (I’m trademarking this), you can decide for yourself.  Here’s Comic AG Digital issue 04 in Epub format.  I’m that nice.  Would you prefer reading e-manga this way, or would you like to have better readability by breaking up the pages into panels?  Let me know in the comments section.

VII. Production notes

A few key points on preparing Comic AG issue 04 for nook that may be helpful to others…

• Resize pages to fit within 584 x 714 pixels.  The nook seems to allow some more vertical resolution, but not a whole lot, and following these dimensions will ensure wider compatibility with all Epub-capable devices.
• If you wish to use PDF format, resizing the images to 584 x 714 will give you the same visual results as Epub.  Just keep in mind that fonts, shapes, and all the fancy stuff is out.
• Publishers should pick Epub over PDF if basic DRM is a desired feature.  I’ve tested DRM ADE files.  They work.
• Due to the lower contrast of the screen, images may benefit from being darkened slightly with the levels tool.
• Resampling manga from high-res bitmap files causes moire.  To reduce moire, I resampled images using the bicubic smoother option in Photoshop.  If that isn’t available to you, convert the bitmap to grayscale and use the blur filter once or twice before resizing in bicubic mode.

Edit: Please see here for some additional notes on formatting PDF comics for nook.