I received the following email from reader Julius Adams and am reprinting it in full. Are other people having a similar experience?
Good morning..
I was wondering if you or someone on your staff could look into the new B&N Nook for iPhone app. It is horrible, and they took away the previous B&N EReader app since this went up for download. Last night I was on the phone with customer service explaining the issues, and the people I spoke to had NO CLUE what to do, or why this was happening. Yet look at the comments on iTunes! I had a decent experience for a total of 2 days (per my iTunes review, which I obviously jumped the gun on and need to revise) and now it is a bust. The issues are as follows:
1. Crashes randomly, just a black screen
2. Does not delete a previously read book when requested to do so, keeps re-downloading it into the phone on it’s own despite selecting REMOVE FROM DEVICE option
3. Tells me that a newly purchased book is in the OLD PDB format and can not be opened, did this for two books I bought THIS WEEK! One I had just finished reading, the other was open , then couldn’t be opened for this so-called problem! They open just fine using the previous app (which thank goodness I kept!)
4. Fonts are either TOO SMALL or TOO LARGE, nothing really adequate for the iPhone
5. Re-download of app, then reset of phone, MAY have helped as those 2 books now open… But CRASHES still continue.
HOW did anyone at B&N let this get by? How d they expect to sell books with an unusable app? No wonder they are hurting! Worse, for those who deleted the previous app, or are trying for the first time, they are sunk, and will give up on B&N immediately.
YET people over there are stymied, and confused, and know they have a problem when you talk to customer service. Do you have a contact who cares over there? This is just ridiculous.
My wife has the latest wi-fi- only NOOK and it is great, but this “port” of that software (which it appears to be) is horrible. Needs to be told. THANKS!
The first iPad version of the B&N software was pretty bad too. Slow/laggy and would let you purchase and download content that couldn’t be read in the app (newspapers and magazines) without so much as a warning. They have no idea what they are doing.
Unlike amazon, B&N has very little experience in the webworld and consumer electronics and are probably contracting it out. Obviously they hired the wrong people. Hopefully the first version of the Nook for iPhone will be fixed later after their first goal of getting something out the door and posted is over. The previous version was a slightly customized version of the venerable eReader Pro, which around since the Palm days. Making a brand new ereader with new code is going to be a buggy process.
However, this is the critical moment. If the app still has the flaws and crashes after the next few months, then consumer confidence in them may waver towards other sources such as Amazon or iBooks. I’m already decided I won’t purchase any more ebooks from B&N until I see how this this shakes out.
When it was first released for Android I couldn’t login at all. I gave up on it till they pushed out a new version (two to three days ago). Out of curiosity I downloaded and tried it out and now I can login fine to it but haven’t really tested it beyond that. I checked the fixes and sure enough, one of them just stated login. Be interesting if we now had the better version 🙂 I still wouldn’t use it though, just seems clunky and I prefer Aldiko anyways.
Great product if you live in North America. Try using this software or accessing bn.com from anywhere else. E-readers are a North American product which is useless anywhere east of Cape Cod.
And here we are in February, 6 months later and all the problems listed above, persist. I loved eReader (expecially the dark background and lockable orientation) but NooK is worse than awful. I’m done with B&N.