If you’re a technophile – or just a very, very creep person – you may have heard that some guy created an animatronic sex robot. Well, sorry Pal, but Barnes & Noble has outdone you with its twelve ounces of distilled sex called nook.

I absolutely love this thing, because it takes something I already love – reading – and makes it even better. Like many people, I was initially skeptical of the whole e-reader phenomena, because I thought nothing could replace the feel of a book in your hands, or the smell of the pages.

I was wrong. The nook isn’t cheap or flimsy, and it really feels like you’re holding something when it’s in your hand. The e-ink display is sharp and easy to read, and lacks the eye-straining flicker of a computer screen. The momentary lag when the screen flips to a new page isn’t long enough to be a bother.

I had also worried about losing the ability to feel how far into a book you were, but nook has a nice feature that replaces that physical feel; the bottom of the screen has a little ‘1 / 200′ page indicator, and a progress bar that shows you how much more you have to read.

And the little annoyances that books provide are gone. I don’t have to worry about a book being too unwieldy to hold in one hand, or a too-stiff spine slamming my book closed in the middle of a sentence. I don’t have to debate whether or not its worth trying to cram a five-hundred page tome into my messenger bag. I’ve only had my nook for a couple of hours, but it already feels like the way reading is supposed to be.

I charged my nook by hooking it up to my laptop’s USB port, the same way I charge my phone and my iPod. That hookup also let me set custom screen savers and wall papers, and import a PDF of a story I’m working on, so I can read it on the go.

The touch screen is bright and responsive, and the digital QWERTY seems at least as accurate as the one on my HTC Hero, though I wasn’t trying to double-thumb it, so your mileage may vary.

I only have a couple of minor complaints. One, it wasn’t immediately clear to me how to actually start reading the book I has selected; the little circle inside of a rectangle on the right side of the touchscreen looked like a placeholder to me, not an actual UI element. Two, you have to create a sub-folder under “My Wallpapers” to get nook to recognize your photos. I understand why this is true, but it’s annoying. Finally, the layout of an imported PDF is a little bit wanky – newlines and occasional characters are eaten, which throws off the formatting a little. I’m told that this is true any time you try to convert from PDF to ePub, but it still bothers me.

On the whole, I’m totally sold on nook. This isn’t a surprise, since I played with one in-store before ordering it, and knew what I was in for, but it’s still nice to be validated.

If you aren’t a reader, nook is (obviously) not for you. And if you’re only a casual reader, you can probably give it a pass, too. But if you love books, you’ll love nook.