A cheap Nook Color case from an unexpected place

I take my Nook Color with me enough that I wanted a case for it, but nothing too fancy, seeing as I’d rather spend money on hardware than on accessories.

Most retail stores carry cases for 7-inch tablets and e-readers, but they’re a high-margin item, often selling for $20 and up, which is 25% of what I paid for the device. I looked on Amazon, of course, where I found multiple cases for less than $10, but found conflicting reports as to whether any given case actually fit the Nook Color.

I found what I was looking for at Big Lots, of all places.

Big Lots sells a lot of low-end tablets. Tucked into a corner of the store (not in the electronics aisle, in this case) I found a couple of boxes of “universal” tablet cases. Most of them were too gaudy for me, but I found a basic black one that looks fine. They were priced at $5.

It’s some kind of vinyl with a small amount of padding on the front and back, and the tag says it’s 100% made of synthetic materials. It has four elastic straps to grab the corners and a big elastic strap to hold the case open or closed. It’ll protect the screen if I throw the device into a bag, and would provide adequate protection if it fell off a desk or table. I wouldn’t try a drop onto concrete with this case for protection, but as long as I don’t do anything to the tablet that I wouldn’t do to a laptop, it’ll be fine.

I might be more inclined to pay $25 for a more substantial case to protect a costlier tablet. But I think $5 worth of protection is adequate for a low-end device like mine, and $5 is cheap enough that it seems irresponsible not to give the device that protection, now that I know where to find it.

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