Congratulations on your purchase of the NOOK Tablet, NOOK Color, or NOOK Simple Touch™, Barnes & Noble’s (simply B&N from here on) ebook readers. The NOOK Tablet, released in November 2011, is a souped-up NOOK Color, which itself debuted in November 2010. Both NOOK Tablet and NOOK Color feature multitouch VividView color screens—VividView is B&N lingo for a full-color touch screen. The NOOK Simple Touch, which first went on sale in June 2011, features an E Ink reading display that bears a remarkable resemblance to paper. The NOOK Tablet and NOOK Color resemble a tablet like the iPad or Samsung Galaxy in many ways, but B&N has intentionally focused it as an ereading device without the full set of features to be found in a tablet. This focuses attention on the reading experience of books, newspapers, and magazines while keeping the price down. The NOOK Tablet and NOOK Color are an attempt to balance the features of the tablet with the immersive experience of reading. The NOOK Tablet and NOOK Color can hold approximately 6,000 books out-of-the-box. (The original NOOK can hold approximately 1,500 books.) In other words, if you read one book per week, your NOOK Tablet can hold enough books for almost 116 years of reading, and if you add a microSD card to your NOOK Color, you can easily hold enough books for many lifetimes!

The NOOK Simple Touch is a simple-to-use device slightly bigger than a paperback. Because it is not backlit, you can easily read a book in bright sunlight with very little glare. Also, its E Ink screen is less than ideal for reading graphic-intensive books, but for reading the latest mystery or newspapers, it is an excellent device that can go anywhere and is easy on the eyes.