Barnes & Noble Unveils Nook, $259 eBook Reader

<dl class="wp-caption alignleft caption-alignleft">

Take a look! It is a Nook! Use the thing to read a book!

</dl>

Barnes & Noble (BKS) on Tuesday unveiled the Nook, a $259 eBook reader. The company said it has begun taking pre-orders for the device on the Web, and will begin taking orders for the device tomorrow in the company’s stores.

The company said the device will have access to over one million eBooks, newspapers and magazines.

The device is based on the Google Android operating system, which is better known for use in cell phones. In one of several features that distinguish the Nook from other competing products - including the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle - the Nook has a small secondary color screen for navigation. Customers get free Internet access for the device on the AT&T (T) mobile broadband network, as well as WiFi access in the company’s stores. The device also allows “digital lending” of many eBooks to other Nook users - as well as people with Barnes & Noble eReader software running on PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPod Touches and certain BlackBerry and Motorola phones - for up to 14 days via the device’s “LendMe” technology.

The device is about the size and weight of a paperback book. It features a virtual keyboard, with 2 GB of storage on board, expandable to another 16 GB with a MIcroSD card. The device can also read PDF-formatted documents, and you can transfer photos to the device to create custom screensavers. Most best-sellers and new releases for the device are priced at $9.99.

The obvious questions: is the eBook market getting too crowded? Does this cause problems for Amazon? Will the much-anticipated (but unannounced) Apple (AAPL) tablet crush the existing field? And can the publishing industry survive with best-sellers priced at 10 bucks?

We’ll see.

The Wall Street Journal live-blogged the launch event in New York on Tuesday.