The case is now charcoal gray, as opposed to white, a move that helps enhance readability. But that wasn't the only step B&N took to boost the readability of the display.
The significant remaining addition to the Nook is its new E-Ink Pearl display. E-Ink Pearl brings Nook up to speed with the other monochrome e-readers on the market today. The new Nook uses the same 6-inch, 800-by-600-pixel Pearl display that and integrated in their e-readers last summer and fall, respectively, and the same display as in Kobo's eReader Touch Edition. The Pearl display is known for providing better contrast than earlier-generation E-Ink displays, but oddly, in my hands-on tests with the three e-readers side-by-side, I observed different results.
I found that the new Nook's display provided only nominally better contrast than the one on Nook First Edition, and that the Amazon Kindle actually has the best contrast of the three, with blacker blacks, and a brighter gray background than on the new Nook. I had the three e-readers set to similar text passages, with closely matching if not identical fonts (at the least, I observed behavior with all e-readers set to nonserif fonts, and to serif fonts). However, the Kindle and the new Nook flipped places on the home-screen display: There, the Nook looked better than the Kindle. I chalk this up to the vagaries of the different fonts and text sizes, and to the fact that these differences cause the blacks to appear different on the different devices. They're close, but by no means identical, in spite of using the same display technology.
In truth, I found the Nook's text not as crisp or dark as on Amazon's Kindle. I liked it better than original Nook, but preferred the Kindle's text presentation the best.
Where B&N hits one out of the park: Its page refresh rates and speedy page turns. B&N says that on text pages, it has reduced the flashing between page turns by up to 80 percent. It does so by doing a full refresh only every sixth page, a move that minimizes the annoying page-flashing effect long associated with E-Ink. B&N does targeted refreshes on a page that has just graphics changing (for example, in the e-reader's bookstore), and on areas that will have a heavy redraw. Page turn speed is up, too: If you hold and press the page forward and back buttons to scan by page, the pages will blow by with an impressive speed not seen before on an E-Ink e-reader.