Barnes & Noble introduces Nook e-reader

Jake Widman
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 06:27

Your IT - Mobility

As expected, bookseller Barnes & Noble has announced a dual-screen e-book reader dubbed the Nook. The company has also entered into a partnership with Adobe to work on e-book standards.

Rumors of today's announcement surfaced last week, and the Nook pretty much matches the device described in the rumors.

It's got both a 6-inch E-Ink grayscale screen for reading, as well as a 3.5-inch color LCD screen for navigation and searching. The color screen can also display a virtual keyboard to aid in searches.

Running on Android, the Nook supports 802.11 b/g WiFi as well as AT&T 3G wireless network connectivity. Brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble stores will offer free wireless access to Nook owners.

The device comes with 2 GB of memory -- enough to hold up o 1,500 e-books, according to the announcement -- as well as a MicroSD slot for additional storage. It's also an MP3 player and features a standard headphone jack.

The new Nook e-reader. Click for larger image. Courtesy Barnes & Noble.

The Nook can display e-books in Adobe's EPUB or the PDB Ereader formats, as well as standard PDF documents. It can also display a JPG image as a screensaver.

Barnes & Noble claims to have more than a million e-books ready for download, as well as subscriptions to more than 20 newspapers and several magazines.

For how the Nook compares to the Kindle, see Page 2.