14 DAY TRIAL // Although Amazon's Kindle has mostly led the e-reader market since the race began, it looks like Barnes & Noble has finally snatched the leading place in the ongoing struggle, or so reports suggest.
E-readers are one of those market segments that managed to increase in profile by quite a great deal over the past couple of years.
With so much information becoming digitized, it was not strange to see many books in electronic format in need of a means to reach public eyes.
The e-book reader was the solution eventually chosen, leading to such items as the Amazon Kindle and the B&N Nook.
The former is the one that has actually been in the clear lead, particularly in terms of sales, enabling Amazon to reach the point where it sold more e-books than paper ones.
Turns out, however, that as far as ratings go, Amazon is no longer on the foremost position, even though its sales figures are solid.
Consumer Reports says that the most recent Nook incarnation (All-New Nook), dubbed Simple Touch, either bests or matches the Kindle in almost every respect.
The simplified form factor is one of the plusses, since the extra screen and other elements of the frame are no longer present to distract one from the act of reading.
Nook also got a perk in the form of the possibility of loaning e-books from public libraries, something that Amazon will only get around to enabling later this year.
All in all, the rating method of Consumer Reports put the All-New Nook about 1 point ahead of its Amazon analogue, whose price is the same $140.
Amazon might be able to restore its lead by delivering some firmware updates and finishing preparations for the book loans quickly. Then again, Barnes and Noble should also have all it needs to update its own product, so things might continue to be interesting for a while yet.