Barnes and Noble Announces the Nook
Amazon’s Kindle is about to have serious competition, with the new Barnes and Noble Nook E-Book Reader.
The Nook uses a similar E Ink display, but has some interesting improvements over the Kindle too, including the ability to connect to the Barnes and Noble store through Wi-Fi (in addition to 3G), a color touch screen for browsing through books, and a feature called LendMe, which lets you lend your e-books to friends for up to 14 days. The Nook also has a nice feature that the first edition of the Kindle had (but that was removed from the Kindle 2) — you can install an SD memory card to expand its internal memory.
Barnes and Noble claims that they have over one million titles ready to go as e-books, about twice the number that Amazon currently offers. And the Nook will also have applications for personal computers and mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.
This new device runs Android, Google’s OS for mobile devices, which raises the possibility that Barnes and Noble may allow developers to write their own applications for the Nook.
The e-book market is really beginning to heat up.
UPDATE at 10/22/09 2:36:18 pm:
Amazon announced today that they will soon offer one of these Nook features on the Kindle; you’ll be able to sync and read Kindle e-books with a personal computer: Amazon Kindle’s Blog: Kindle for PC Coming Soon.
The Kindle blog only mentions Windows PCs — don’t forget us Mac users, Amazon!
Frank says: