The good news is that Android users now have a choice of buying and reading eBooks with apps from Amazon, Borders, Kobo, or Barnes & Noble (not to mention free eBook apps such as Aldiko). That’s because Barnes & Noble is the latest major US booksellers to launch an Android app, with today’s introduction of Nook for Android.
The bad news is that the developers don’t seem to realize that most Android phones don’t have a ton of free store space for apps. The Nook installer is about 5MB, but after installing the app on my phone it took up 17.68MB of space. That makes it the largest app on my phone, by a longshot. Next up is Adobe Flash, which weighs in at 10.82MB. In fact the only app I’ve ever installed that was larger was Fennec (Firefox Mobile). By comparison, Amazon Kindle for Android takes up 3.58MB, while the Borders app is just 888KB.
If you can get past the enormous file size, Nook for Android offers pretty much everything you’d expect from an eBook app. Read the rest of this entry »