Remember the Nook? Barnes & Noble apparently just did, with the company quietly releasing the Nook GlowLight 3, in an announcement that will make you go, “Wait, what? They’re still making Nooks?”
The GlowLight 3 is the first real new Nook released since 2015, back when Barnes & Noble released the actually pretty good sounding GlowLight Plus, which beat Amazon to a water resistant e-reader by a couple of years and added an aluminum case to boot at a $130 price point. Compare that to Amazon, which only offers water resistance on the recently released (and extremely expensive) Kindle Oasis.
The GlowLight 3 bizarrely takes a step in the opposite direction
The GlowLight 3 bizarrely takes a step in the opposite direction from the Plus, removing the aluminum back and the waterproofing features entirely. Instead, it adds a screen that can now adjust color temperature and some physical page turning buttons. They’re nice updates, don’t get me wrong, but the whole thing feels like a massive step backward that makes it tough to justify buying the GlowLight 3 over the much more popular Kindle Paperwhite, which has the same screen, the same price, and a dramatically better ecosystem of books.
The rest of the GlowLight 3’s specs are more or less what you’d expect from an e-reader — there’s a 300ppi display, a 50 day battery life, and chunky bezels that seem to dominate the face of the device.
The GlowLight 3 is available for preorder from Barnes & Noble for $119.99, and is expected to ship on November 8th.