The world's largest bookseller, Barnes & Noble, has confirmed it is to enter the e-Reader market with a device called the nook. Powered by Android 1.5 and sporting the now familiar e-Ink text display, the nook also benefits from a 3.5-inch colour touchscreen interface for library browsing and book ordering. It allows wireless access to over a million eBooks, magazines and newspapers and purchases can be shared with friends.
Barnes & Noble claims that the nook is the world's most advanced e-Reader. Underneath the reading area sits a 3.5 inch colour touchscreen interface which is used for navigation of the Barnes & Noble e-Bookstore or to swipe through the cover art and title library of purchased e-Books on the device's 2 GB of memory. Tap the cover of the book you want to read and text appears in the reading pane.
Whilst this is not the first time this technology has been used in an e-Reader, Barnes & Noble is likely to be the first to bring it to the marketplace with release scheduled for the end of November.
The nook's internal memory can store up to 1500 e-Books but this can be expanded via the MicroSD slot to become virtually limitless. Barnes & Noble claims that titles are downloaded from its e-Bookstore in seconds over AT&T's wireless 3G mobile broadband network - at no extra cost to the user. Barnes & Noble store is also offering free wireless in-store browsing of complete books.
The e-Bookstore currently holds over a million titles and whilst best-sellers and new releases have been priced at under US$10, many classics and popular reads can be downloaded free of charge. The e-Books sitting on the nook will be stored in either open EPUB or PDB format which is copy protected by Adobe's Content Server software solution but the device also reads PDF documents.
Barnes & Noble currently offers subscription to a number of newspapers in the US and the company plans to expand this service to cover every major US daily. Subscription to many magazines is also offered.
Using what Barnes & Noble calls LendMe technology, the nook will also allow users to lend titles to friends. Your friend's device doesn't have to be another nook as Barnes & Noble e-Reader software can also be freely used on PC, laptop or Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry or Motorola Smartphones and any Android or Windows based mobile device.
A full battery charge should take 3.5 hours and will be good for ten days of reading so long as you don't use the device's wireless capabilities. With battery life in mind, the device incorporates Smart 3G technology to turn on wireless connectivity only when it is needed.
Priced at US$259 the nook has a 7.7 inch x 4.9 inch x 0.5 inch and 11.2 ounce body for which there are a range of accessories.
Source: Gizmag
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