New B/N Reader for iPad

From CNET's David Camoy, a first-reaction:

... We'll have more thoughts on the new app once we play around with it for a few days, but our intitial impression is that it matches up well against Amazon's Kindle for iPad app and Apple's own iBooks app and even has a few potentially nice extras to help differentiate it. We liked the List view (it's more robust looking than the Kindle apps List view) and the customization options for the page layout give you something to tinker with, though it took us a moment to figure out that the "themes" setting, which includes some preset page designs (you can save your own themes as well), was accessible through a small link at the top of the font settings menu.

The one question we had was what periodicals would actually be available. The one periodical we had in our demo account was the Wall Street Journal, and it wouldn't load on the iPad. All our books loaded fine. (We'll give you more details as we get them). ...

Elsewhere, at Gizmodo, Matt Buchanan provides a very good, balanced analysis of the app's benefits and shortcomings. Matt's likes: a multidevice platform providing access to one's B/N library across the range of computers as well as the Nook, iPad and the new iPhone and forthcoming Android apps ... of course, lots more books to choose from than what you'll find among Apple's iBooks ... B/N's lending feature remains intact, though a bit hard to negotiate ergonomically ... more customizable than the Kindle iPad app ... and a stronger search tool than Kindle's app. Matt's dislikes: Ugly screen, a book-buying process that shoots you out of the browser, less great syncing and library management tools than the Kindle app, no free reading of eBooks within B/N stores as with the Nook, no interoperable DRM solution (so good luck sideloading previously purchased books to other devices). No can do. At least not in the current iteration, although B/N says it is working on this. Matt's final analysis (italics mine):

Like Amazon, Barnes & Noble's endgoal isn't actually to sell you a slab of plastic and silicon. It's to sell you an ecosystem, to glue you to their platform. That's why you can read their books on iPads, nooks, computers, BlackBerrys, whatever. They don't care about the thing you're reading on, so long as they're selling what you're reading.

Here's the thing, if you're actually trying to decide which ebook ecosystem to buy into, if you haven't already: You should go with the ebook ecosystem that you think will last, since all of your books that aren't free are going to be tied up by DRM, and you don't want to wind up like the suckers who bought music files from Walmart when they shut down their store. Obviously, if you've already bought a nook or Kindle, you've made your decision. )

Barnes & Noble's app is, for many reasons, the best right now. They're using the more universal ePub standard. But do you have any doubt Amazon's going to improve their iPad app? Amazon also owns 80 percent of the ebook market. Their ecosystem works better on a broader level, though you are very much locked to it, in part because of their proprietary file format.