Barnes & Noble launches new Nook tablet

By Phil Wahba

NEW YORK |
Mon Nov 7, 2011 10:20pm IST

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Barnes Noble Inc introduced its first tablet to compete with Amazon.com Inc and Apple Inc for holiday sales.

Barnes Noble will charge $249 for the Nook tablet, which is expected to hit the shelves late next week. That compares to the $199 price tag on Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, which ships Nov 15.

The Nook tablet has a 7-inch screen, comes with 16 gigabytes of storage, weighs less than one pound, offers nine hours of video viewing and works with Netflix Inc video libraries and the Hulu Plus streaming service, Barnes Noble said on Monday.

Chief Executive William Lynch said that the 8 gigabytes of storage offered by Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet was “deficient.”

The new Nook also has a 1GHz dual-core processor and one gigabyte of RAM, Barnes Noble added.

Barnes Noble has faced years of shrinking book sales, so it has invested tens of millions of dollars to develop the Nook to reinvent itself as readers move to digital formats. It claims to now have about a quarter of the digital books market.

The company’s shares were down 2 cents at $11.59 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Barnes Noble also cut the price of its e-reader devices to compete with Amazon, which lowered the price of its Kindle e-readers earlier this year.

The Nook Color will be $199 instead of $249, while the Nook Simple Touch costs $99, without ads, versus $139 before.

Amazon priced its entry-level Kindle e-reader recently at $79, with ads, and $109 without special offers.

(Additional reporting by Alistair Barr in San Francisco; Editing by Derek Caney)

Article source: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtechnologyNews/~3/u-kRqoUn4Hs/idINIndia-60370220111107

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