Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight 3 Review

The Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight 3 is a solid piece of hardware for $119.99.

Purely on that basis, it's a little nicer than its main competitor, the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (also $119.99), and its color-changing front light and physical page-turn buttons add well to the reading experience.

But ebook readers aren't just hardware: They're hardware plus a service, and Barnes & Noble's software and service offering just doesn't feel competitive.

Its store has fewer books, its books have fewer features, and its interface isn't as smooth as Amazon's or Kobo's.

That makes the Nook GlowLight 3 more of a niche choice for ePub-format book fans rather than an overall winner.

Press the Button, Flip the Page

The Nook is a familiar-looking e-reader.

It's a small, light piece of black plastic, at 6.9 by 5.0 by 0.4 inches and 6.7 ounces (lighter than the 7.2-ounce Paperwhite).

The matte back is grippable, but picks up finger grease stains easily.

On both sides of the screen, there are physical page-turn buttons, something the Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo readers lack.

The buttons are a little stiff, though; they're not nearly as smooth as the ones on the much more expensive Kindle Oasis.

Below the screen, the home button is shaped like a lowercase "n," marking this as a Nook.

The 300ppi, 1,448-by-1,072 E Ink Carta screen is the same as Amazon uses on its Paperwhite and more premium products, and it's very readable.

It's slightly higher resolution than the Kobo Aura H2O ($179.99), although the Aura H2O's screen is bigger at 6.8 inches.

The most impressive thing about the Nook is its color-changing "GlowLight." It shifts from a cool blue to a warm yellow, either through user settings or based on the device's internal clock.

Amazon's Paperwhite uses a bluish-white light, while the Kobo Aura H2O and Aura One both have blue-to-yellow lights.

This is why you're here: a perfectly restful, outdoor-viewable display with a nice pale background and crisp black type.

Battery life depends on how much you use the light.

With heavy use, I got about 300 page turns on a charge.

Barnes & Noble says that with the font light at 10 percent and wireless off, you should be able to get up to 1,500 page flips, which feels ambitious.

That's about the same battery life as you get on the Kindle Paperwhite, though.

The GlowLight 3 isn't waterproof.

If you're worried about that, you need the Kobo Aura H2O or the Kindle Oasis ($249.99).

Interface and Features

You load books into the Nook by buying them from Barnes & Noble's store, or by transferring them via micro USB cable from a PC.

The Nook has 6.5GB of free onboard storage.

Downloads come via 2.4GHz Wi-Fi.

Operating the Nook for anything other than flipping pages is noticeably sluggish.

Waking the reader up and switching modes can often take several seconds.

The device uses a 1GHz Freescale single-core Cortex-A9 processor and has 512MB of RAM, but I'm not ready to judge whether the problem here is hardware or software.

The Nook supports multiple users on the same purchase account, and each user has their own set of "shelves" to let you separate, for instance, kids' and adults' books.

You can divide large libraries into groups.

On the home screen, along with a button to go to your shelves, to go to the store, and to resume reading, there's a button for Barnes & Noble Readouts, promotional snippets of books you might want to buy.

Within books, the interface is very basic.

If you tap on the screen, some menus and a page slider pop up.

You can go to the table of contents, change to one of six fonts in a range of sizes, jump to a certain page, search within the book, or add or refer to highlights and bookmarks.

That's about it.

Amazon has a much richer set of features.

There's X-Ray to help you track characters and themes, and FreeTime to let parents keep an eye on their kids' reading progress.

The Kindle Unlimited subscription service supplies an endless stream of (mediocre) books.

Kindles support cellular connections when out of Wi-Fi range (if you buy a cellular model), Audible audiobooks (on some models), text-to-speech, emailing files to load them, and integrated Goodreads recommendations.

Kobo has more fonts and sizes, and Facebook connectivity.

I had a fine time flipping through long reads on the Nook, because most of the time, flipping pages is all you need.

If you're picking an ebook ecosystem, though, the Nook is clearly behind its competitors on features.

Not the World's Biggest Bookstore

I remember when you could find anything at a Barnes & Noble.

These days, it's hard to even find a Barnes & Noble.

B&N's online bookstore falls far short of Amazon's.

They'll both have the best sellers you find at the airport bookstore or on library shelves, but once you dig deeper, B&N has holes.

A lot of that comes down to the fact that Amazon is now a major publisher, and doesn't seem to offer ebooks in non-Kindle formats.

To give some examples, award-winning nonfiction book "Evicted" and the whole popular middle grade series "Wings of Fire" are available on both stores.

But our editor Jamie Lendino's book "Breakout," about the history of the Atari 800, Hugh Howey's popular "Dust," and Chris Beckett's "Daughter of Eden" (all of which I've read recently) are all Kindle-only.

The browsing experience on the Nook also isn't that pleasant, because the interface is very slow.

You're often left staring at three "loading" dots for a while, or waiting for images to render.

For library books, the Nook experience is more awkward than the Kindle experience.

You have to download books using your PC into the Adobe Digital Editions app and transfer them with a cable.

The Adobe app is buggy, and we had trouble getting the Nook to show up on the desktop of two PCs.

With Kindles, libraries just push books through the cloud.

The Nook does have one major advantage over the Kindle: It supports more file formats natively.

Specifically, it does a bang-up job with unprotected ePub books, and is able to read PDFs (although the text can be too small to read, and pinch-to-zoom is unreliable).

Kindles require you to convert ePubs and PDFs first, and often lose formatting and indexes along the way.

If ePub is your primary reading format, the Nook will be a trusty companion.

Kobo's e-readers, meanwhile, support even more formats: not just PDF and ePub, but CBR and CBZ for comics.

Conclusions

The Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight 3 is a good-enough e-reader with some unique features for its price.

Most notably, that color-changing front light is notable for $119.99; with Kobo, you need to go up to the $179.99 Aura H2O to get that.

The screen is also delightfully sharp.

Look at the hardware specs, and you're getting some great value for the money here.

So why am I hesitant to recommend this over a Kobo, much less the Paperwhite? The sluggish interface and third-place store selection play a major role.

I also think cloud-based library book delivery crushes having to use the difficult Adobe Digital Editions app.

I know, that doesn't matter to you if your primary use is sideloading ePubs.

But I'm making a judgement call that the vast majority of Americans don't e-read by sideloading ePubs.

I'm also concerned about Barnes & Noble's corporate wobbliness.

While Amazon is a powerhouse and Kobo is owned by Japanese giant Rakuten, B&N has really struggled in the market, closing stores over the years and most recently firing many full-time employees at all of its stores in February.

That includes the people doing in-store support for Nook devices, according to a worker's blog post.

A sale or major shift in strategy could imperil the Nook store, making Nooks much less functional.

That means we can give the Nook GlowLight 3 a good review for its basic reading experience, but not recommend it to most people.

The Kindle Paperwhite remains our Editors' Choice at this price, and will please the largest amount of users.

If you prefer ePub books, meanwhile, you should spend a little more and get the waterproof Kobo Aura H2O.