The latest generation Barnes and Noble Nook Glowlight Plus 7.8 is on sale for Black Friday. This is the first time their e-reader has been on sale, since it came out in June. The regular price is $199, but the bookseller discounted it by 15% and it is now available for $169.99. This discount can be attained by purchasing it online or in any of the 650 retail locations.
The Nook Glowlight Plus features a E Ink Carta HD 7.8 inch display with a resolution of 1404×1872 with 300 PPI. You will be able to read at night via the front-lit display and it also has a color temperature system to help defuse the bright white light.
There are 19 LED lights on the top of the bezel and project light downwards, evenly across the screen. There are 10 white LED lights and 9 orange ones. The vast majority of e-readers on the market have the LED lights on the bottom of the screen, Nook does things a bit differently. Overall, the lighting system is really polished. I noticed if you just have the normal front-light on, the screen has a bluish hue. If you engage in the color temperature system to the 30% mark, you get a glorious white screen, that is on par with the Kindle Paperwhite 4 and the Kobo Forma.
The new Nook is waterproof with IPx7 certification, which allows the device to be submerged in 3ft. of water up to 30 minutes. On a general level, it will be immune to spills from tea or coffee and can be used in the bathtub. If there are water droplets on the screen, it can still be used with the manual page turn buttons, but the touchscreen tends not to work. If it completely submerged in water, again the touchscreen doesn’t work, but the manual page turn keys do.
Underneath the hood is a Freescale Solo Lite IMX6 1GHZ single core processor, 1 GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. When you turn it on the for the first time there is around 6.9GB available, the rest is allocated towards the Android OS. It does not have an SD card, so this will prevent people from loading in a massive collection of content. I think it is important to note that this version of the Nook does not have any restrictions on sideloaded content and the internal drive does not have more than 1 partition, you can basically sideload in as much as you want.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
