Am I tempted? I'll admit to being tempted. Am I stupid enough to pay $240 over a year in order to get a $99 Nook for free? Sure, I'm that stupid.

I think this is a clever promotion. The truth is, I'd love to sit down with the New York Times on Sunday mornings and look things over; I might even check it out on other mornings with my coffee if it were this convenient.

Will I get that experience from the Times on a Nook? I don't know. Perhaps I'll regret it a month into the subscription.

And if I didn't already own books in the Kindle eco-system (what is this world coming to?) it might be a double-no-brainer.

But, still... I'm tempted.

Dan notes in this piece that the color Nook is "crippled" because it can't load other Android apps; to me, apps are less interesting than the speed of the processor (my Android phone doesn't load all Android apps b/c it's too damn slow!) and the quality of the touchscreen -- whether it's really useful for typing, surfing and e-mail.

This could be the first cheaper iPad alternative -- half the price, good storage, support for some Office document functions -- that I've seen that will at least be worth a visit to the store.

Plus, there are some very real possibilities in my life (and, increasingly, in the lives of some of the folks who work for the JFP) where something that can (a.) display PDF documents nicely, (b.) access e-mail, and (c.) surf the Web, could be a very compelling "hand-held" device to use as a sales tool, a PDA, or for accessing online CRM, e-mail, etc. I'm watching.

Harbinger of things to come?

Confluence of events -- over my vacation I started reading the "Girl Who..." trilogy at the behest of Ms. D and her friend Ms. H, and they're good. Very entertaining. I don't have the third one, which I plan to procure.

Meanwhile, this weekend while trying to kill some time waiting for Ms. D while she got her glasses fixed, I was in a Best Buy and got to fumbling around with the Nook. I found it interesting -- a bit tough to navigate initially, but then it kicked in and starting doing some cool stuff. Ultimately it got me thinking that a nice little reader of some kind could be what the doctor ordered -- might even be how I decide to read "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest."

Later, it occurred to me that the Kindle had also lowered it's prices as well. (Congrats, Amazon -- marketing works.) So I went to Amazon and floated around on the site for a while and *almost* bought one this weekend.

Since I've pretty much been wrapped up in the idea of getting an iPad (when the stars align and the $500+ makes sense), I haven't thought much about a Kindle or Nook. Now I'm second guessing that.

Things I would use it for -- reading books (a plus for Kindle or Nook over iPad, IMHO) as well as for some quick surfing from my easy chair -- I like to read Wikipedia and IMDB entries about movies I've just watched. While buzzing around the Amazon.com site, I also got in my head the possibility that I might consume the New York Times on a regular basis if I had it in a fabulously portable format.

Advantages to the iPad, of course, are that I would also use it for app development and testing (for JFP and BOOM) as well as more in-depth surfing, perhaps some Netflix watching, documents, perhaps even sales, PDFs, flipbooks (again for sales or for demo-ing our publications) and other things I haven't thought about, like GTD processing.

But, iPad is $500 down the road and these things are less expensive. And enticing. And shiny (actually, rather matte, but you know what I mean). Hmm.