The splashy Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet are hogging all the attention in the e-reader category. But they’re not going to render old-school e-readers with monochrome E-Ink displays (and correspondingly epic battery life) obsolete anytime soon. Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch is, indeed, simple–so much so that you can lose yourself in your reading materials and forget it’s a piece of consumer electronics. A recent software upgrade dramatically ups its page-flipping speed. And unlike Amazon’s similar $99 Kindle Touch, the Nook doesn’t put ads on your screen saver.
Price: $99 at Barnes & Noble