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Barnes & Noble go up against Amazon in Blighty with Nook apps

May turn out to be more of a Niche offering really

Optimistic Amazon competitor Barnes & Noble has launched its Nook platform in the UK, in soft form for iOS and Android, but enough to start selling books to Brits.

Like Amazon's Kindle the concept behind the Nook platform is hardware used to sell digital content, with Nooks ranging from a basic e-ink model ($99) to a 9-inch tablet coming in at $269, but none of those are available on this side of the pond where we're stuck with iOS and Android apps to read Nook books.

The apps are nice enough, though we couldn't get the Android version installed on a Samsung tablet it ran well enough on a phone and has the best page-turning animation we've seen - if you select e-reading software on that basis then this is an obvious choice.

Nook does the cloudly synchronisation like Kindle does, but we couldn't get it to import any library books (which keeps Aldiko installed) and the browser version of the reader didn't work for us in Chrome at all (we had more luck with Firefox) so it's hard to identify the killer reason one would want this installed.

In use it works fine, presenting scalable text and remembering to price things in pounds (most of the time). Once the hardware arrives over here then there might be more reason to choose the Barnes and Noble platform, but by that time so many will have chosen Amazon it might be too late. ®

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