A New Electronic Reader, the Nook, Enters the Market

As widely expected, Barnes & Noble unveiled its Nook electronic reading device at a splashy news conference on Tuesday to generally positive views from the publishing community, and offered some details about its whispered-about lending capabilities.




As much as anything, publishers seemed relieved that Barnes & Noble, which operates the nation’s largest chain of bookstores, had produced a credible alternative to Amazon’s Kindle. The Nook, priced at $259, went on sale Tuesday afternoon at nook.com, at a price that matched the latest edition of the Kindle. The Nook will ship starting in late November.

Amazon currently dominates the market for electronic readers. Estimates vary, but according to the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, Amazon has sold about 945,000 units, compared with 525,000 units of the Sony Reader. 

Barnes & Noble opened an e-bookstore in July, and its editions, which are available in ePub and Adobe PDF versions, can be read on a variety of devices, including Apple’s iPhone, the BlackBerry, Macs and PCs. Barnes & Noble will continue to support those devices, as well as forthcoming e-readers from iRex and Plastic Logic.

But it is clear the company is trying to consolidate sales of e-books onto the Nook, which features a six-inch gray and white reading screen and a color touch screen control panel. In any of the chain’s 1,300 stores, consumers can download books on the Wi-Fi network. Outside the stores, consumers will access AT&T’s 3G network to download books.

One of the differentiating factors of the Nook is that customers can “lend” books to friends. But customers may lend out any given title only one time for a total of 14 days and they cannot read it on their own Nook while it is lent. 

In an interview, William Lynch, president of Barnes&Noble.com, said the company would aggressively market the Nook within its bricks and mortar stores. The Nook also has software that will detect when a consumer walks into a store so that it can push out coupons and other promotions like excerpts from forthcoming books or suggestions for new reading. While in stores, Nook owners will be able to read any e-book through streaming software.


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