The Barnes & Noble Nook: One step better than Kindle?
"If you just ordered a Kindle, stop reading now or you鈥檙e in for a giant dose of buyer鈥檚 remorse," trumpets Gadget Lab. The Barnes & Noble Nook is scheduled for landing today and some are saying that it bests the Kindle, inside and out.
The news about Barnes & Noble's new e-reader was leaked when someone at the Wall Street Journal saw an ad set to run in next Sunday's New York Times. The new gadget looks a lot sharper than the Kindle (see the pictures at ) and will cost the same ($259). It has a color multi-touch screen and will offer wireless capability.
Reports have it that Barnes & Noble will be offering book titles to readers at heavy discounts. They will also make available to Nook readers the 500,000 free (public domain) titles from the .
Add to all that the report that the Nook will allow its users to freely lend, borrow, and resell e-titles 鈥� something Kindle does not permit (and one of the advantages hitherto firmly in the court of paper books.)
The has its own story about the Nook today, in which a prediction from the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, is referenced. Codex foresees that the number of people who own e-readers will more or less double to about 3.8 million readers by the end of this year, from about 1.6 million in August.
If you're a reader, this may all be good news. If you're a bookstore owner, however, this has got to be one of the scariest mornings of your life. Because it's not just the Nook. Take a look at the other big headline making book news this morning: . Along with Walmart.com and amazon.com, Target will be offering some of the season's hottest titles at $8.99, plus free shipping.
If you're a traditional brick-and-mortar bookstore 鈥� wow. I can't even begin to imagine where it goes from here.
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor鈥檚 book editor. You can follow her on Twitter at .听听听