Barnes & Noble Nook: Ebook reader Nook priced at $259
Barnes & Noble Nook vs Amazon Kindle 2 battle on the cards
Barnes & Noble Nook ebook reader photo
Barnes & Noble Nook, an ebook reader from Barnes & Noble will be launched on Tuesday. The latest ebook reader will come at a price of $259, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Barnes & Noble Nook’s price compares well with the Amazon Kindle, the world’s biggest manufacturer of ebook readers.
The Barnes & Noble Nook will have a color touchscreen and runs on the open source platform Android, pioneered by Google. According to some reports, Google was directly involved in the design of the Barnes & Noble ebook reader Nook, to the extent of specifying the minutest technical details for the product. Very little extra information on the Nook’s specifications is available right now.
Several photos of the Nook have already popped up on the Net – you can see from the few that we have here that the Nook looks quite similar to the Kindle 2. At least in the photos.
An advertisement, expected to appear in the New York Times, which was spied on by WSJ says that the new e-reader Nook will have a lending facility – where you can lend ebook you have purchased on the Barnes & Noble Nook to your friends. The Amazon Kindle doesn’t allow lending of purchased ebooks. Buyers of books from Amazon Kindle e-reader can download the books to their own computers, but cannot be transferred to another device or another person.
Nook runs Android!
The Android operating system of Barnes & Noble Nook may help it offset Amazon’s biggest advantage – the millions of books it has on its virtual shelves. Kindle works on a proprietary platform.
Google has pushing to open the ebook market to the public for quite some time. Recently, it has tried to make available several thousands of books available online, which have been out of print. Barnes & Noble, the largest bookseller in thw US by volume, recently opened sales of digital books, in an attempt to catch up with Amazon, which is leading in internet retailing.
Amazon’s Kindle downloads books, magazines and newspapers electronically through Sprint’s 3G network. It is not clear which carrier has been selected by Barnes & Noble for use with the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are seen as potential partners.
Barnes & Noble has already reserved a website for the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader at www.nook.com
However, it will be a tough task for Barnes & Noble to prise open the e-book reader market with the Barnes & Noble Nook. Sony has already made an attempt at this market, which is dominated by Amazon’s Kindle. Recently, Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle ebook reader, and launched new models. It is also making a new international model available for customers in Europe and rest of the world, though it comes at a steeper price tag.
Those who have had a look at the Barnes & Noble Nook have come away impressed. In comparison to its touchscreen, Android interphase and ability to lend and borrow books, the old-format Kindle with its proprietary format, clunky keys and ageing appearance looks like a product of the past.
Some reports say that the Barnes & Noble Nook will come with a color screen, while some others aren’t so sure. Manufacturers have traditionally claimed that color touchscreens are not as reader-friendly as the black & white e-ink format. Engadget reported, citing their own sources that Best Buy may be a retailing partner for Barnes & Noble in selling its ebook reader Nook.
Users of Amazon’s Kindle do not have to pay for the wireless charges in downloading the books over Sprint. Amazon pays the bill. The cost of the wireless data transfer is built into the price of the book or the subscription. It’s still to be seen how Barnes & Noble prices purchases and data transfers. Also, Amazon sets the prices of ebooks downloaded over the Kindle, which is something the publishers and Google have never liked. Its possible that the authors and publishers will be able to price their products independently on the Barnes & Noble Nook. Of course, Google’s libraries of ebooks will also be available to users for free.
Fully-functional e-book readers, however, are still a long way from India. This is because wireless downloading of ebooks requires a fast data connection, either 3G or WiFi, which are still rare in India. And without wireless downloading of ebooks and periodicals, the Barnes & Noble Nook – or the Kindle for that matter – is as good as a digital photo frame, which you can use to read downloaed ebooks. And that, sadly, is not the sole purpose of buying an expensive ebook reader.
We will be keeping a hawk’s eye on for when more information on the actual specifications of the Nook become available, as well as for any leaked photos or videos of the Nook’s interface.