Barnes & Noble Introduces New 7″ Color Touchscreen eReader

The nation’s largest bookseller introduced a long-anticipated new ereader to the market today called the Nookcolor. Rumors have been buzzing around the internet after B&N announced they were going to have a press event today. According to Barnes & Noble’s website, the Nookcolor sports the following features:

Stunning 7-inch color touchscreen

Magazines & newspapers in rich color

Kids’ books come alive

Over 2 million titles at your fingertips

Get social, surf the web, play games, even listen to music

As far as technical specs go, they are quite impressive. The Nookcolor has 8GB of memory which can store 6000 ebooks (expadable to 32GB with a memory SD card. In addition, it can also hold up to 100 hours of music (MP3 and ACC files) and can play videos in MP4 format.

Barnes & Noble is also opening the Nookcolor up to developers to create apps on the Android platform. The device comes with chess, sodoku, crossword puzzles and Pandora Internet Radio preinstalled.

The Nookcolor WiFi will retail for $249 and will ship November 19.

I find it intriguing that B&N is trying to compete with the iPad so early in the game. My bets were on B&N releasing a cheaper $99 version of Nook to pump up their ebook sales over the holidays. Looks like they went the other way. I must add though, I’m quite impressed.

It will be interesting to see how Amazon responds, given they have been competing with B&N so fiercely over the last year.

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Read More: eBooks, Technology