Photo: Tim Carmody/Wired.com.
NEW YORK — Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color is real. For $250, it may even be spectacular. Readers will find out for themselves sometime around Nov. 19.
“Our customers snack on content of all kinds all day,” Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in a press conference announcing the device. He called the new Nook Color “the first reader’s tablet.”
The bookseller’s second-generation e-reader takes aim at both Amazon and entry-level Android tablets. Like its predecessor, the Nook Color is powered by Android. But this e-reader gives Google’s OS a bit more of a workout, ditching the low-power, monochrome E Ink display and the two-screen interface of the original Nook.
Instead, it’s got a 7-inch color LCD touchscreen made by LG. The screen technology is called “VividView” and incorporates an anti-glare coating, but is otherwise far closer to a tablet display than an e-book reader like the Kindle.
In related e-book reader news, Amazon announced Tuesday that the Kindle would be gaining a
strictly limited e-book lending feature similar to what the B&N Nook has. That’s a remarkable about-face for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
This graduates the Nook from dedicated e-reader to personal media player, if not quite a full tablet computer. In addition to Barnes & Noble’s current library of EPUB-derived black-and-white e-books, the Nook Color will be able to display color books, photos and games, multimedia-enhanced e-books, a good chunk of the web and even video.
Opportunities to test out the new Nook Color were very limited. Barnes & Noble did not give reporters unfettered access to the device. Most of the press conference centered on giant mockups on the screen.
The first showpieces for Nook Color will be magazines and newspapers. Barnes & Noble has partnered with Condé Nast (parent company of Wired magazine and Wired.com) and Hearst to offer magazines as both single issues and as subscriptions. (Apple lets publishers sell tablet magazines for its iPad, but hasn’t sorted out subscriptions just yet.)
B&N is also inviting other developers to create interactive color reading content specifically for Nook Color. The company is starting a program for developers to create Android applications specifically for the new device, to be offered in the Nook store. At launch, the Applications section will offer Pandora for streaming music, a handful of games like chess and sudoku, and a gallery application for viewing photos and video.
You’ll also be able to upload media by mounting the Nook Color as a hard drive on your PC’s desktop (using a USB cable) and doing a drag-and-drop. It will support MP3 and AAC audio and MP4 video.
When you also consider the recently announced Nook Kids store for children’s books, Barnes & Noble’s strategy is clear: Flank Amazon, Apple and other Android devices by offering formats and genres at the seams, which the other devices’ hardware and marketplace models have difficulty handling. While Apple’s hardware offers vivid color and interactivity, and Amazon’s store is flush with books and periodicals, Nook Color will have both.
Nook Color will also leverage its Wi-Fi connection to integrate reading with popular social networks. Readers will be able to share comments and excerpts from books, newspapers or magazines by e-mail, Facebook or Twitter, by opening up a submenu while viewing a document.
The interface will be familiar to existing Nook readers. In its default view, the library scrolls along the bottom quarter of the screen (where the old LCD touchscreen used to be), although you can also navigate in full screen.
Barnes & Noble was able to keep the device fairly lightweight: The Yves Béhar design weighs less than a pound and comes in at just one-half-inch thick. It will have 8 GB of internal storage and a microSD port for additional memory.
The battery life predictably suffers from supporting an LCD color screen, but Barnes & Noble claims it will still get around 8 hours of reading time.
There are some things the Nook Color won’t do. There’s no 3G option, which saves you some money and Barnes & Noble a lot, but does limit your ability to buy a book on a whim at an airport or hotel. It won’t have access to the Android Market or have the ability to run applications originally designed for other Android devices. You’ll be stuck with the apps Barnes & Noble’s picks, unless you opt to root/jailbreak your device.
Barnes & Noble’s Nook has been available for less than a year, but it’s quickly established itself as a solid competitor to the Kindle, capturing 20 percent of the e-book retail market, a worthy Pepsi to Amazon’s Coke.
The company has leveraged its in-store presence and customer base, building Nook boutiques in stores, and offering free Wi-Fi and book browsing there. It’s also branched out from its own stores, selling its reader online, and at other retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy. The company plans to continue that wide retail availability with Nook Color.
Barnes & Noble plans to continue selling the original Nook as an entry-level black-and-white E Ink reader for $150 and $200, and it promises to continue to support and enhance the original device.
It’s clear, though, that Barnes & Noble is thinking of E Ink readers as a “segment of the e-reading market,” to borrow a phrase its executives used over and over again. Its bet is on interactive color as the e-reading standard of the future.
When asked whether Nook Color would cannibalize Barnes & Noble’s sales of print books, Lynch pointed to data suggesting that current Nook owners were actually buying more print books from Barnes & Noble.
“We plan to cannibalize other people’s physical book sales more than our own,” he added.
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Accessory makers are the weak link in keeping any super-secret product launch super-secret, even if the folks making accessories are in the same company. So it’s not especially a surprise that a Nook Color Film Screen Kit appearing on (then quickly pulled from) BarnesAndNoble.com has leaked a likely image of the Nook Color a day early.