We like e-readers because they are easy on the eyes and relatively simple, with one use case: reading. The Nook, made by Barnes and Noble, has been a solid e-reader option since 2009, and the brand has released several traditional tablets along the way. This year it updated its tablet made in collaboration with Lenovo.
Although it’s branded as Nook, it’s not exactly an e-reader. You can read it, it comes with the Nook app loaded, but it is the 2024 version of the M9 tab It runs Android 13, so it’s a tablet first. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Given the relatively affordable price of $150, it means you or your child can get a pretty decent tablet without spending hundreds.
Reading room
Photography: Medea Giordano
The 9-inch, 1340 x 800 screen is small enough to fit in a bag, but you can still comfortably stream your favorite shows while traveling or walking on a treadmill. This isn’t the most vivid display you can find on a tablet, but I still watched clear YouTube videos at 1080p, and with Dolby Atmos, they sounded clear too.
There’s a headphone jack (hallelujah!), or you can plug in Bluetooth headphones to listen to music or audiobooks. If you’re set on seeing richer colors and stronger contrast, you’ll probably want something better, but you’re probably not trying to find a tablet in this price range either.
It comes with 64 gigabytes of storage for all your books and apps, or you can add your own microSD card to expand it to 128 gigabytes. You’ll get up to 13 hours of battery life, but expect a few hours less if you primarily stream video.
While in the Nook app, you may want to turn on chroma reading mode for color books to reduce the color temperature or grayscale to make the screen black and white. But it’s still an LCD screen, so it’s not as easy on the eyes as a dedicated e-reader. One thing I don’t like about the Nook app is that swiping pages is similar to swiping to close an app, so I frequently found myself on the home screen instead of the next page.
The tablet has a notification-free mode that you can set for any app you choose, and I would suggest adding the Nook app to that list. E-readers are nice because they are distraction-free, so turning off notifications helps regain that feeling of focus.
Photography: Medea Giordano