Last night Barnes & Noble unveiled the $249 Nook Color, and we collected instant reactions to the eReader with a 7-inch color touch display, eBook sampling features, and the ability to play video. Today, we’ve found two essays that embody two sides of the Nook Color debate.
James McQuivey from Forrester Research praised the Nook at Paid Content: “Right now, publishers are trapped between grayscale books with limited or no interactivity and iPad apps they don’t have the money or time to develop. Nook Color will offer an opportunity to put books that are already sold in color—cookbooks, travel books, to name the most obvious—in an e-bookstore to find out how much people will pay for those, without having to get into the world of iPad app pricing and development.”
TechCrunch attacked the device: “The last thing the world needs right now is another Android tablet, especially when the focus for e-readers should be on distinguishing them from tablets and not trying to compete with more capable and connected devices. Amazon is already neck-deep in Kindle sales, and this gamble by Barnes & Noble essentially forfeits their portion of this generation of e-readers.”
Finally, Sarah Weinman took the middle ground, calling the device “comfortably mainstream.“