I bought the B&N Nook ebook reader after my dissatisfaction with my previous reader, the Sony PRS-600. I have previously looked at the Amazon Kindle that my sister owns, while it is a very nice reader, I typically shy away from any electronic device that doesn't support industry standard, and in the case of ebook readers, the Amazon Kindle doesn't support the ePub format, so my only other option is the B&N Nook.
After using it for more than 6 months, I am pretty positive about the reader, it has a very nice screen (which is the most important feature in a ebook reader) that is easy on the eye and with almost no glare, and B&N has released several firmware updates during that time which added several new features (games and browser) as well as fixed a few nagging problems (page flip speed is the main one), I find myself read a lot more than before, I probably read more books this year than the last 5 years combined. And another great thing about the Nook is that you can get a free ebook from B&N every Friday, some of the books they offered for free were not exactly the genre that I usually read, but hey, who can argue with free!
However, compare to the Sony PRS-600 and the Kindle, Nook felt a lot heavier, it's still not really heavy by any means, but if you had to hold it up without support for a long time, it might make a difference for someone, and even though the page flipping performance has been improved in the firmware updates, it still lags behind the other readers I have tried, this generally isn't a problem during regular reading, but if you had to flip back 10 pages to look for something, the slower speed can be a bit annoying.
Despite of some short-comings, the Nook is a very good reader, and with the recent price reduction, it definitely is a viable alternative to the market share leader, the Kindle, and since it supports industry standard, I felt a lot safer with my purchase, since I can still continue to buy books for it even if B&N cease to exist.
