Just tap and hold the ‘n’ button at the bottom of the screen, and the light comes on the longer you hold, the brighter it gets.

In practice, accessing the GlowLight is dead simple, and requires no fumbling in the dark. It even came in handy in ambient-light situations, such as in a sunlight-kissed airplane with no cabin lights on in this environment, the GlowLight caused the text on the Nook Simple Touch to pop more, and made it easier to read. More important, the light that the Nook SimpleTouch With GlowLight delivers is more subtle and targeted than anything a clip-on light or overhead light could ever hope to achieve, and that alone makes the built-in light a win. Personally, I’ve never found a clip-on light, usually at least a $20 option, to be adequate it’s just one more thing for me to remember to carry around. While testing the Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight, I found that the GlowLight transformed spots I formerly considered e-reader dead zones into bona fide reading spaces, whether I was in bed reading in the dark, or sitting on a red-eye flight looking to unwind with a book without disturbing my seatmates with the too-bright overhead light. The illumination runs a little brighter near the top of the screen, but not distractingly so. The light shines down on the display, creating a mostly evenly lit surface. The LED light guide sits inside the Nook’s bezel, at the top of the 600-by-800-pixel, 6-inch E Ink Pearl display. Sony tried to do so four years ago, with its Reader PRS-700, but that model’s LED lighting, while useful in a pinch, barely reached the center of the page.īarnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight doesn’t have that problem. The GlowLight makes the Nook Simple Touch e-reader highly adaptable to your environment–and it makes Barnes & Noble the first company to truly deliver on the promise of a built-in light source.

2012 barnes and noble nook reader