nook rant

I have recently purchased a nook from Barnes and Noble. EReaders have been around for quite some time, and I've been looking at them for years, but I've put off purchasing one. None are exactly what I'm looking for. In a moment of weakness, I gave in to B&N's intensive advertising campaign and purchased their eReader. This is the first technological purchase I've made that I've regretted. I realized, after the fact, that what I truly desire in an eReader can only be found in the iPad. I want more than just an ereader for a particular vender, I want a multipurpose and adaptable machine! In addition, this eReader joins the other techie gadgets in my purse - my phone and my iTouch, so now I need a bigger purse just to hold all this junk! Ridiculous. I used to read using an eReader application on my iTouch, which worked fine and still gave me access to my music, videos, and other apps. But obviously the device is too small to read for long periods of time. This is what sparked my perusal of eReaders. When Amazon's Kindle came out, I was hesitant. I liked the size and the new screen, but I didn't like the fact that I could only get Amazon ebooks. Since its original release, that may have changed, but it has been a continual bone of contention for me because Apple has the same policy with music, video, etc. and its DRM keeps me from truly owning my own downloads. It also makes it difficult to fully realize media downloaded from other sources – although at least it’s possible to get media from other sources. Since I didn’t want to deal with these types of restrictions on yet another product, I avoided the Kindle. The nook, however, seemed slightly more promising. There is already a folder created to hold other documents besides the ones downloaded from Barnes and Noble. As a grad student who downloads a lot of articles from databases for research purposes, I saw a lot of possibilities. That is how I justified my purchase. Unfortunately I have been greatly disappointed in this area. What I see as the nook’s greatest weakness as an eReading device is the inability to create additional folders within the “Documents” folder and its lack of a search function. I have ebooks I’ve downloaded from my previous eReader software mixed in with research articles of various subject with no way to organize them. Very frustrating. I am hoping that as software updates are made, B&N will take a hint from some of the discussion posts on their own website and begin making changes to please their customers rather than adding relatively useless and unrelated features such as sudoku and chess.