Guess who got a Nook/Bolter and Hammer Review

So my wife got me a nook for my birthday this year. With all of the Black Library books coming out as ebooks, and the fact that they are all a dollar cheaper if you buy them electronically, it makes sense. With all the books I read in a year, the thing will probably pay for itself before the year is out.

So last night I broke the thing out of its box and powered it up. One odd thing about the nook is that it is recommended to be fully charged before you play with it. So I had to plug it in to the wall and wait a couple of hours.

Another odd thing my wife tells me (she has a nook as well) is that even though it uses a USB cable connected to a plug to charge it, it will only charge if it is plugged into the wall. It will not charge if it is plugged into your computer through a USB port, even though it is using the same cable.

Once it was charged up I had to power it up and start playing. And that of course called for some Black Library eBooks. I had previously bought Prospero Burns and read it on my wife's nook as a test to see if I would actually like it. Black Library remembered that I had already purchased that and let me down load the book on to my computer (we downloaded it to my wife's computer last time). I also bought Shadow King and the first issue of Hammer and Bolter.

I wasn't sure about Hammer and Bolter. It is a monthly publication of short stories and it costs about $4 for each month. Lets just say I've been less than please with other subscriptions I have purchased from Games Workshop so I was dubious at best, but I thought, "what the hell," and gave it a chance.

What I got for my $4 was 219 pages of text. Now, granted, I think the text is in a large font than the novels, but there is still a good bit of stories in this first issue.

What they give us is a short story by Dan Abnett about Inquisitor Endor, a comrade of Eisenhorn. This story was a very melencholy story which you don't really see in 40k fiction. I think Mr. Abnett was really streaching his creative legs on this one and did a very good job.

One of the things I am a little unhappy about is that the Silver Skulls story, Primal Instinct, is the same story as the one in Victories of the Space Marines. I hope they do not follow this trend and "double dip" on the stories. I paid for it once, I don't want to pay again to get the same story.

To offset the bad is the good. Ben Counter is serializing the next Soul Drinkers book. In this issue of B&H we get the first two chapters of .

There is also an interview with Nick Kyme, a Gotrek and Felix story, and even some more.

All in all, this is an excellent bargan for $4, and I plan on buying all of the back issues. I hope they can keep up the momentem and keep producing a quality product. I give the first issue five Bolter-Hammers out of five.