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With Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, the two of the largest book retailers in the US, offering a huge array of eBooks, eNewspapers, etc., it was just a matter of time before B&N offered an eBook reader to compete with the hugely popular Kindle reader offered by Amazon. Amazon’s site says they have over 360,000 publications now available in electronic form, while B&N boasts over 1 million. That’s a lot of instant gratification!

Starting at around $260, B&N will offer a competitor to Kindle in November. Called “Nook,” it claims to be easier to read than other readers.   A neat thing about the Nook is that has a full-color touch-screen navigation display of book covers along the bottom, so you can see what they look like. Just tap one to select it.

The two readers are quite similar, with a few exceptions. Nook will have 2G worth of storage for about 1500 books, the same as the basic Kindle. But an expansion card will let you save up to 17,500.  The Kindle2 is not expandable.  It offers WiFi technology, which the Kindle2 doesn’t, and if you take it to a B&N store you can use it there to get coupons, free sample eBooks, and other proprietary content.

Other unique features include more titles (1 million+ versus 360K for the Kindle), support for PDF documents (a plus as far as I’m concerned!), a lending capability if you want to “loan out” your eBooks to others, and a replaceable battery.

All in all, it looks like the Nook could give Kindle a run for its money, and its release just before the Holidays could make Christmas shopping interesting! I know that for the last couple of years Amazon had a heck of a time keeping Kindle in stock for holiday shopping, and the lack of product made a lot of potential buyers very unhappy. We love to give and get gadgets for gifts!

Do you have a digital reader? Leave a comment on how you like it, how often you use it, and whether you think it was worth the money. And also tell me why you like it! I personally don’t own one, and have no intention of buying one. At least not yet. I love books. I love how they look on the shelves, how they feel when you hold them, how they smell. I can’t think of any advantages to having a digital reader that would make me happy to give up “real” books. I’m not that wild about spending a lot of time reading off a screen (I do a lot of work on the computer, and after a while my eyes get tired!), although you can still curl up with your reader in your favorite chair just like with a real book.

And if I did want to get one, there are a couple of things that concern me that keep me from putting it on my Christmas list. The first is compatability with different eBook formats. Are they mutually exclusive, or was the industry smarter this time? Those of us “of a certain age” remember the bad old days when video players came in two mutually exclusive formats: Beta and VHS. If you had a Beta machine, you couldn’t play VHS tapes and vice versa. It was maddening to go to the video store and find that the version of the movie you wanted to rent was unavailable. The end result, finally, was that VHS killed off the Beta-Max, even though many claimed the viewing quality of Beta movies was far superior. We see the same silliness with cell phones and their “proprietary” formats. I’m not a technical expert, so I don’t know if I got a Nook I’d still be able to shop for eBooks on Amazon, or would I have to shop at B&N?

A related issue is availability of eBooks for the titles I wanted to read. Its fine to have a million titles, but if I don’t want to read any of them, then I won’t be happy. I don’t know that all my favorite authors are published in eBook format… I know this is a popular publishing platform for new authors, but what about the oldies but goodies??

And finally, the potential 800 lb gorilla – Apple – has yet to weigh in with a digital reader product of its own. Given how my family loves their i-gadgets, I’d certainly want to check out the Apple product before buying! I also think that $250 and up is a lot to pay, and think that prices can only go down as more players with credible products come into the market. I’ve never been an early-adopter of new technology, because I hate to see the price drop like a rock after I’ve just bought the latest-greatest gadget! I’m happy to wait until the dust settles and the price comes down.

And then all I’d need is a really good reason to buy one!