NOOK GlowLight 4 Plus now available for pre-order

While the E-Reader world has long been dominated by Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble has captured some of the market with its NOOK line of E-Readers. The latest iteration of the NOOK is now available for pre-order  directly from Barnes & Noble. 

The NOOK GlowLight 4 Plus has a 7.8-inch 300 PPI e Ink display. The display sits flush with the screen, which Barnes & Noble says helps to keep dust from building up along the edges of the screen. The display also has a built-in front light with an adjustable color temperature to reduce eye strain and can detect touch input. There are physical page-turn buttons along the sides as well. 

The GlowLight 4 Plus has an IPx7 dust- and water-resistance rating, meaning that it can be submerged in 3 feet of water for up to 30 minutes without ill effect. (It should be pointed out that this rating applies to fresh water, so beach readers should still use caution.) 

The device has 32 GB of internal storage. As such, it should be able to hold thousands of E-Books. The GlowLight 4 Plus also has a 3.5 mm headphone jack and supports Bluetooth audio, so audiobooks are also on the table. The E-Reader charges and syncs via a USB-C port on the bottom. 

WiFi is limited to 802.11 b/g/n; while this seems limiting on paper, keep in mind that NOOK devices aren't designed for browsing the web (in fact, their web browsers aren't readily available to end users). 

Perhaps the biggest advantage of NOOK devices over the more popular Kindle is the former's support for side-loading content. While Amazon's Kindle is locked to Amazon's book store and Kindle filetypes (.azw3). E-Books using the more common EPUB filetype can be sent to a Kindle library via Amazon services, but they will be converted to .azw3, and the process isn't exactly smooth. However, Barnes & Noble's NOOK E-Readers support EPUB (and other file types, such as .pdf) out of the box, and the process for loading these kinds of files onto the device can be done via a file browser. 

The NOOK GlowLight 4 Plus is available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble for US$199.99. 

Buy an Amazon Kindle (2022) at Amazon.