Before you can start using a NOOK Tablet or NOOK Color, you need to buy one. If you’ve got a Barnes & Noble store near you (and you likely do, considering how many there are), head for the NOOK section—pretty much all the stores have one, and the salespeople are more than happy to help you find it. You can hold NOOKs in your hands, try them out, and ask for advice about them. And once you do that, you’ll most likely want to buy one.

As this book goes to press, the NOOK Color costs $169, and the NOOK Tablet costs either $199 or $249, depending on the amount of storage. Why the price difference? For starters, the NOOK Tablet comes with a 1 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM, while the NOOK Color has a 800 Mhz single-core processor and 512 MB of RAM. What does that mean in real-world terms? The NOOK Tablet will do things faster for you than will the NOOK Color. That doesn’t mean the NOOK Color isn’t fast, because it is. It means that that the NOOK Tablet is super-fast. In addition, the $249 NOOK Tablet comes with twice the built-in memory (16 GB for the NOOK Tablet versus 8 GB for the NOOK Color). The $199 NOOK ....