First off, I like technology. I like my computer, DVR, iTunes, love my smartphone, so you'd think it would be a natural progression. But I love my physical books and I wasn't planning on buying an e-reader. Then I got a Nook for Christmas in 2011.  And I wanted to like it, but y'know, it's just not like a book. 

You have to plug it in at least every couple days or the battery runs down, and yes I've tweaked the settings for max battery life. I hate it when I'm in the middle of the book at 8:00 at night and the battery gets too low. I have to plug it in and go find another book to read.

The idea of downloading books from the library was thrilling. You don't have to drive there! But in practice, my library's download app is kinda flaky. I have downloaded books, but about 10% of the time the download repeatedly fails. Some of what I want isn't digital, and most of it I have to get on the waiting list (true for the physical books too, gotta be fair). 

And free books, woohoo! 99 cent books, gosh! However I have discovered that for 95% of them, there's a reason they're free. I have started an amazing number of stinkers. I won't look at them any more unless it's an author I know trying to get some sales movement.

We just went on vacation. Long car trip, lots of reading time. Perfect, I thought, for taking the Nook. I successfully (yay!) downloaded 3 library books and started reading. Then I made the mistake of connecting to the hotel wi-fi. The Nook upgraded it's OS and Adobe Digital Editions lost my authorization. Couldn't finish the book I was in the middle of, couldn't open any of the others. Fortunately I had a backup paperback. It's so much easier. You just open it and start reading.  You don't have to plug it in, upgrade it, turn the wireless on or off, remember your account password...you just read it.

Sigh...I'll still use my Nook, but this particular technology is not making me love it.

I'm sorry you don't like your Nook.  I was like you and not sure that I would like an ereader.  That quickly changed and I have fallen in love with my kindle.  I usually remember to charge it about once per week but when we're traveling, it's a God send.  I can read a book a day easily when traveling.  My kindle can fit in such a small space unlike when I had to take a suitcase just for my books!  Except for charging, which I do when I remember and I can plug it into my cell phone charger meaning we only need to bring one charger for everything, I never plug it in.  If I must download a book, which I sometime do, I just email it to my kindle.

Maybe it's a getting use to thing.  I hope you learn to love your Nook as much as I love my kindle.

Sounds like you have nothing to lose by rooting it to an android tablet. You do have the simple touch, right? If you root it you can do a lot more with it, including put the Amazon Kindle app on it, and the B&N app, and lots more. 

Your battery issues are not good, have you tried letting it run all the way down and then letting it charge? Sometimes that can help. Sounds like you can't read it while it's charging? Some readers are like that. Maybe all the touch ones, I don't know.

If you go over to mobileread.com you can read up about rooting your NST. You can watch videos of it too. Oh yeah this guy here has a good tutorial.

I have often contemplated getting a refurb NST just so I can root it. I may do that some time.

I have a Nook Simple Touch and have had none of the problems you're describing, so I'm assuming you either have the Color or the Tablet.

Battery life: On the NST, I get about 30 hours of read time before needing to charge. My husband's iPad with a similar size and backlit screen to a Color/Tablet, gets about 8 hours tops. He charges his every night overnight. Just like a Bluetooth or GPS Navigation will drain your cell phone faster than just talking, anything wireless connected and graphics heavy will drain a tablet of any brand. A movie? You'll be dead in the water in 3 hours. You may want to play around with turning off any wifi/3G and putting it in airplane mode unless you're actively downloading it. Also, if there are any kind of apps similar to the Weather Channel, it will look for a GPS satellite every 3 seconds or so to get you your weather forecast and that will kill your battery.

Library books: I love downloading library books in my pajamas. I read as many library books as I can on my Nook. But, not all publishers participate in the digital library ending program, and so for those publishers you still have to go to the library and get the physical book. I know some of the authors I have to go get are Brad Thor, Lisa Kleypas, and David Baldacci. I wish they all did, but since I'm cheap thrifty, I'll read a digital or paper library book before I buy a digital/paper copy and usually a used copy from PBS falls in between those. If you're more impatient or less budget minded, you can purchase a digital copy of virtually any book on the planet at B&N for your Nook.

Self-published dreck: Yeah, there's a reason a lot of this is free. They couldn't get signed by a regular publisher so they self-publish and we all download it because it's free/99c and so do a lot of other people. In fact, down in the Love and Romance forum, there's an entire thread of Historical Romance e-freebies with hundreds, if not thousands, of free historical romance ebooks out there. The percentage of bad books is tremendously high and I had to quit. It's funny though- there are some ereaders who will proudly tell you they have thousands of books on their ereader and didn't pay a dime. I always want to ask them what the quality level is of those books though.

I will tell you this: I rarely travel out of the house with a paper book. It's always my Nook. It fits in my purse and doesn't weigh it down. If I start a new book and it sucks, I have others to read. I can eat in a restaurant and use my Nook without having to worry about elbowing someone at the next table or questionable cover content. I will self-edit what I read if it's a tight space. I have airplane books. Those do not contain the word "nipple" anywhere in the text LOL. And why this is, I don't know, but ereaders make you look smart in public. They have a sophistication level that goes above an iPad or a smartphone. People are shocked that not only do you read, but you read enough and are technlogically advanced enough to have an entire piece of technology just for books. Why that impresses them, I don't know. But, it does.

I will tell you this: I rarely travel out of the house with a paper book. It's always my Nook. It fits in my purse and doesn't weigh it down. If I start a new book and it sucks, I have others to read. 

Oh me too. I hate being without choices. I panic over the thought of being stuck with only one book in hand. I either take a Kindle or my Sony. Plenty to choose from on either one. Sony weighs less and has more books on it, but my Kindle is where I get news sent so I'll take that to catch up on the headlines.

Cyndi, I assumed you meant an e-ink Nook. If you have the LCD color Nook, I urge you to look into getting an e-ink reader in addition to your color reader. You will be AMAZED. I have a Nook Color and can read on it, but I prefer by far to read on any e-ink ereader. I also love to play with things and really need to see if I can get a cheap Nook Simple Touch so I can root it. Or a 2nd Sony T1 so I can do this other rooting thing.....I don't want to mess with the one I have, which is rooted, but "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." So have to wait and snag one for cheap sometime.

I have the color Nook. So maybe, one day when this thing dies or is outdated enough not to work, I'll try an e-ink reader. Like I said, I want to like it, because I can see a lot of advantages. I think my main gripe is remembering to plug it in. I have not tried to calculate how many hours I get out of the battery, maybe that's worth looking at. I've turned everything off that can be turned off and still read a book. I don't hate it or anything, but it's sure less complicated to just open a paper book and read it.

And of course, if we all had digital copies, it's a lot harder to swap them...

I got a Kindle (but the nook simple touch has a similar battery life) nearly a week ago. I read 2-3 hours a night and my battery says its only 1/4 down from full charge. I turn off wifi unless I are downloading or looking for something to read.   
But the color does NOT get close to the hours the eink does.

I still read paper books too, just use the kindle to find new to me authors to try and that are free.

adobe digital edition is a pain to use. 

Kindle's approach to library lending is easier.  They still do make you do something extra, cause the publishers want it to be more difficult, but it was much easier than gettting library books on my kobo.

Leave the Wifi off unless you need to download something.  The battery life will be much better.

I'm also not sure about my Nook Color, the only advantage it's got over my e-ink Sony is the ease of downloading ebooks.  Other than that, I much prefer my Sony Touch which is an older model so no Wifi on it at all.  It's easy to hook it up to the computer and use Calibre to move ebooks over.  I don't find the internet features on the NC are much worth it, I find it very slow and hard to use.  I may try rooting it one of these days and see if I like it better.

I used to have the NC and now I have the Nook Tablet.  Yes they don't get as much read time as an eink but I prefer their interface.  The NST, "to me", isn't as user friendly and I don't care for the feel of the touch screen.  It's all in what each person prefers.   Leave the wifi off, adjust your brightness settings and adjust your screensaver timeout and you can add life to your battery.  I usually find on my NT that I can get almost 13 hours of read time before I have to charge it again.

I rarely leave home without my basic Kindle; and on the occasion when I don't have it I use the Kindle App on my Smartphone. I rarely use the WiFi, I prefer to DL to the computer then sideload. Unless I use my light a lot, I can usually go about a week without a charge.

-RD

I have a Nook and a Nook Color and I don't really like either one of them.  Neither of them are as easy to use as my Kindle Keyboard and Kindle Fire.  The Kindles are SOO much easier for me to figure out.  And I'm on Amazon all the time so that's helpful.  I have hundreds of books on my Kindles and only a couple free ones on my Nooks.

I have a Sony PRS-505 and the battery is good for about 2 weeks, even after heavy use of about 4 years.  It doesn't have the wireless and all of that junk, which is actually one of the main reasons I still use it.  As long as Calibre keeps updating so that I can make sure the downloads are compatible with my old EReader, I should be able to keep it for a while.  I get most of my downloads for free from places like http://www.gutenberg.org/ or http://archive.org/details/texts .  From time to time I'll download a digital ebook from the library, but not that often.

Yes, I much prefer my Sony PRS600 that doesn't have Wifi over anything else.  Still not really enjoying the NC at all.

I have a Sony 650 e-ink and an iPad.  I love both, but only read on the Sony.   For me, not being backlit, makes it much easier on my eyes.  And as others have said the battery life on the e-ink is much better than the LCD readers/tablets.  I charge my Sony about every two weeks--and then the battery indicator is still showing a 50% charge, so I could probably read for 4 weeks on one charge--that's with reading an hour or two a day. 

I still love reading paper books too.  I wouldn't ever want to give them up--I probably spend about half my time reading on my e-reader and the other half reading paper books.

I read daily on my Kindle, including having it read to me and only charge it about once a week.  I can also read on it while it's charging. 

It's ok to not like your Nook.  Just stick with print. I still prefer print books. But my library has a ton of Kindle books now.  I don't know how it is with Nook. But since I got my Kindle last year at least 20 of my print TBR books have popped as freebies and I was able to purge them.  Many, many of my WL  books here have popped up as freebies or were under $4 to by in ebook format.

I was deadseat against getting an ereader but I finally caved when I moved to this place that is really small and the book clutter was really stressing me out. But I will never completely convert to ebooks.  I refuse to pay as much for an ebook as a print copy costs unless maybe if it's lendable.

I read print primarily at home.  But the Kindle travels with me and is pretty darn handy to have when waiting at Drs. office, when it's super slow at work, traveling etc.,,