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Barnes & Noble announced the new model of its basic Nook eReader today. In place of the rather heavy two-screen first gen nook, the new model uses a touchscreen and is thinner and lighter (and probably much cheaper to produce) than the original. The new Nook does its wireless using wifi only, replacing the more costly 3G service on the original Nook. The price is unchanged at $139 (unsold first gen Nooks are available for $119).
The new Nook is a little wider and heavier than the new Kobo eReader, but otherwise the specs of eReaders are starting to line up pretty closely. I guess this is the sign of a mature market-- like when cars all started using steering wheels instead of the occasional tiller.
At the GigaOm Big Data conference this week, Marc Parrish of Barnes & Noble predicted the publishing business will "totally shift" to electronic formats over the next 24 months, faster than the transition to digital by the music and movie industries. (Presumably he meant eBooks would become the dominant, rather than sole format.)
It's notable that futurist predictions can now being made for radical changes occurring over a period of months rather than years or decades!
An interesting aside was that he projected that 35% of "readers" will own an eBook reader by the end of this year-- however "reader" is defined, it's a reminder that the book market (and libraries) are driven by a relatively small group of consumers.
Amazon's Kindle application for the PC is available now (Macintosh version still in the works), and after a brief try, I can say it does in fact open the Kindle store to the Kindle-less masses. Samples of the first few chapters can be downloaded to the reader software from books in Kindle store.
But the proprietary format used for the Kindle means that the icon for Kindle for PC sits on my desktop next to the similar Barnes and Noble application, as well as the link for Adobe Digital Editions (used for direct purchased from many publishers).
Eventually, managing books in collections segregated by vendor or publisher and accessed through separate reader software will become an obvious problem for consumers ("Now, who did I buy that book from?"). The music industry found out that consumers don't really care which music company produced an album, and I bet the players in the book business find out that book buyers are no different.
Google's announcement that it's coming Google Editions ebook system will work out of a web browser makes more sense everyday.
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Barnes & Noble announced the new model of its basic Nook eReader today. In place of the rather heavy two-screen first gen nook, the new model uses a touchscreen and is thinner and lighter (and probably much cheaper to produce) than the original. The new Nook does its wireless using wifi only, replacing the more costly 3G service on the original Nook. The price is unchanged at $139 (unsold first gen Nooks are available for $119). 
