BTW, I do know for a fact they've shipped at least two, since that's how many I've seen in the wild.

Barnes & Noble Launches Exclusive In-Store Content and Promotions

Barnes & Noble, Inc., the world's largest bookseller, announced that its popular nook eBook reader — the ultimate gift for book lovers — is in stock online at nook.com and will be rolling out in the majority of Barnes & Noble stores beginning mid-week, just in time for Valentine's Day. While in-store, nook customers will enjoy exclusive holiday-themed online content, kicking off this month.

Barnes & Noble quickly sold out of nook stock online over the holidays due to unprecedented customer demand. Since then the company has ramped up production and is shipping stock to the majority of its stores, beginning this week. Customers can visit the Barnes & Noble nook In-Store Locator at www.bn.com/nook/instore, updated daily beginning February 10, to find local stores with devices in-stock.

Enhanced in-store connectivity allows nook customers to seamlessly access fast, free Wi-Fi in Barnes & Noble stores. There, they can browse the extensive library of more than a million eBooks, magazines and newspapers and enjoy exclusive "More In Store" content and promotional offers, officially launching in February, which include:

— A short story by bestselling favorite Adriana Trigiani featuring characters from her newest blockbuster, Brava, Valentine.

— A Valentine's Day recipe for red velvet cupcakes from Anne Byrn, the Cake Mix Doctor.

— "Read Between the Wines," a regular feature by renowned wine expert Kevin Zraly, guides readers and wine lovers through the mystery of pairing books with the perfect vintage.

"nook is the perfect Valentine's Day gift for anyone who loves reading. Demand for nook continues to be very high, and we're pleased our customers will be able to try and buy nook in our stores and online and enjoy it in time for the holiday," said William J. Lynch, President of Barnes & Noble.com. "In Barnes & Noble stores, nook owners will enjoy exciting nook-only content from their favorite authors and other valuable offers, along with fast and free in-store Wi-Fi, which nook customers have been accessing in droves over the last few weeks."

New Barnes & Noble in-store content will be updated weekly and available for a four-week period. nook users can stay apprised of upcoming exclusive More In Store content at www.bn.com/nook/moreinstore. Also in February, nook users in Barnes & Noble stores can enjoy 10 percent off any CD. nook customers need only show the special offer on their nook to the cashier to redeem.

Barnes & Noble has continued to optimize nook software for an improved reading experience with the newly updated nook v1.2. Automatic over the air (OTA) updates, which do not require any action from nook customers, are underway and will be conducted seamlessly through this week. nook customers currently using the previous version can also immediately download v1.2 at www.nook.com/support, where additional update and technical support information is available.

nook marries innovative technology and sleek minimalist design with access to the Barnes & Noble's digital store of over one million eBooks, newspapers and magazines. nook's color touch screen for navigation along with a best-in-class E Ink display offer an immersive, enjoyable e-reading experience. It offers both 3G wireless and Wi-Fi access and is the first to offer digital lending for a wide selection of eBooks through its LendMe(TM) technology.

To learn more and experience nook, visit www.nook.com. Follow our eBooks and other updates on www.bn.com/twitter. To learn more about the free Barnes & Noble eReader software and Barnes & Noble eBookstore apps, visit www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks.

[Barnes & Noble]

If you can bear to part with your Nexus One for three weeks, send it in and pay $175 for the paintjob, or purchase a brand new one—with paintjob—for $800. The Nook is priced at $125 for a three-week splattering of paint on your very own ereader, or for a brand new one it's $400. I could spend hours just imagining picking out the colors on the Nexus One I don't actually own. [Colorware Nook, Colorware Nexus One]

Users at nookDevs are reporting that, after a little clever input tricker, they've managed to get the Pandora radio app running—terribly, it's worth adding—on the Nook. At this point the install process is still pretty intimidating: the rooting procedure itself requires a screwdriver, a microSD reader, a computer running Linux and comfort with the command line, while app installs require setting up a VNC server on the Nook (touchscreen controls evidently don't work properly yet) and launching from an ADB shell session, since the app launcher doesn't work yet. If this sounds overcomplicated, that's because it is.

But the point is, hey, Android apps on the Nook! Pandora's just the first, but a web browser, an email client, and a new homescreen can't be far off. That's when things could get sticky for Barnes & Noble, whose cellular partner, AT&T, won't be too happy about a slew of Nook users trying to use their devices' free data connections for streaming music, browsing the web or downloading more apps. Barnes & Noble had to know this would happen, so I expect devs will find a few roadblocks between hacked apps and the Nook's 3G connection, but who knows? Virtually nothing about the Nook's launch went exactly to plan, so who's to say this will?

Either way, Nook: hacked. Interest: piqued. Eyes: peeled. [nookDevs]

Granted, it's a little worrisome that Barnes & Noble was taking preorders before letting reviewers have their say, so this enforced waiting period—which was probably a planned PR stunt, like the ones that pretty much every other hardware manufacturer ever does ever time they have a new product—is a good thing. At any rate, it'll be January—well after we'll have run B&N's Android-powered ereader through its paces—before anyone who hasn't already placed their order can get one.

UPDATE: Some mild reprieve, from B&N themselves:

Barnes & Noble expects to have a limited stock of devices available in its highest-volume stores during the holiday season.

So, go, if you dare! (In a few weeks.) [B&N via Bits]

In a strategy that seems needlessly drawn-out, BN is pushing the sales of Nook to be mostly online, and the stores that don't have the hardware in stock will instead order it for you online, to be shipped to your home. Each store will have one demo unit, but in many stores, you'll have to wait for online shipping after trying it out. Why they've chosen to go this route is a mystery to me—why would they want to add an extra step for consumers? We're not sure yet exactly which stores will be getting Nooks (or why—maybe a supply issue?); it's not a huge deal but it can't help the Nook's chances.

Update: Barnes and Noble responds:

While it's always difficult to predict demand on a new product, and early from response from consumers is strong, Barnes & Noble expects to have nook eBook readers in stock in the majority of its stores by the peak holiday season and plans to have nook devices in stock in all of its stores by early next year. If the product is out of stock or not available in a particular store, our booksellers can help facilitate an in-store order that will be shipped to the customer's home.

Guess we'll see what the rollout looks like when it actually happens.[Paid Content]

Lending seemed too good to be true: Sure, we knew about the 14-day lending period, but we wondered if it'd work like a library, where you can renew a book before its due date. No such luck. As it turns out, publishers have the right to allow or not allow lending (and book publishers are at least as uptight as record labels) in the first place, so who knows if you'll ever even get to try it. Besides that, you can lend each book one time only, forever. When you lend it, it's unavailable for you to read, which admittedly is what happens when you lend a physical book—but THESE AREN'T PHYSICAL BOOKS. For god's sake, let us enjoy the benefits of digital text!

I'm a little pissed off by this, especially since I was so excited about the Nook, but not entirely surprised. It's like when Microsoft introduced the Zune's sharing feature. They understood that people share physical media and want to share digital media, but still forced (probably at the record labels' behest, but whatever) a 3-play, 3-day restriction that was so strict nobody ever used the feature. And now Barnes & Noble is following in Microsoft's footsteps. Balls. [MobileRead, thanks Gideon!]

• Exclusive: First Photos of Barnes & Noble's Double Screen E-Reader: In which we scoop the crap out of BN's crazy two-screened reader.
• Barnes & Noble's Dual-Screen Nook: $260, Eats the Kindle's Lunch: In which the Nook leaks a few hours early.
• Barnes & Noble Compares Nook to Kindle 2: Biased But Fair: In which BN thoughtfully explains why the Nook whups the Kindle 2's butt.
• Live From Barnes & Noble's Nook Event: In which intrepid reporters John Herrman and Matt Buchanan bring you the Nook's official announcement, live, with bonus Q & A.
• 8 Reasons You Can Finally Love Ebook Readers (Thanks to Nook): In which we explain why the Nook has finally gotten us excited about ebook readers.
• Barnes & Noble Nook Up Close: Yep, It's Real Nice: In which we go hands-on with the Nook, and like it.

[Barnes & Noble Nook coverage on Giz]

It's cost-effective. Yeah, at $260 it's the same price as the Kindle 2, but you're getting so much more for your money: Wi-Fi, native PDF support, an SD slot and that crazy second screen makes it seem out of the Kindle's league. It makes the Sony Reader and iRex look absurdly overpriced and the Plastic Logic Que look like a shot in the dark.

Lending and Sharing. One of my main objections to the Kindle and other readers is that most of my books come from friends, rather than bookstores. The Nook realizes that and integrates a 2-week lending period—plenty of time for a quick read. Plus, you can lend to tons of different devices: Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod Touch, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile (soon).

Sharing is also done really well: As opposed to the Kindle, which only lets you read purchased ebooks on a same-account iPhone or iPod Touch, the Nook lets you read on any device supported, the most important of which are PC and Mac. So you and your significant other could read the same book at the same time, on whatever devices you each prefer. The Kindle, in contrast, doesn't support PC and Mac at all—but we'd be willing to bet Amazon is rethinking that decision right about now. Plus, the Nook syncs both your place in the book and any highlights or annotations you've made, which could be great for students.

Free in-store reading. You'll be able to take the Nook to any of Barnes & Noble's gajillion stores and read one ebook, for free, each time—the same way you might wander into the store, pick up a book and read it for an hour or two. Barnes & Noble is really thinking about how people actually read, which is a great sign: This kind of feature makes the Kindle feel like it's forcing you to change your reading habits rather than adapting to them.

And potential Nook customers will be able to go into a retail store with which they're comfortable and play around with the actual device, an advantage not shared by the Kindle. Given Matt's impressions of the Nook, I think seeing the hardware in person will convince a lot of people to buy it.

Head-turning looks. The Kindle 1 was, um, distinctive, and the Kindle 2 is inoffensive and sleek enough, but the Nook has legitimate style. As Matt said, "it makes even the relatively benign-looking Kindle 2 seem like it was beaten with an ugly stick." It was clear from the first leak that we were dealing with something very different.

Android. There are two things to be excited about when it comes to Android. First is the legit apps, which B&N seems open to—in today's presentation, John wrote "They, ahem, 'haven't announced' anything about app development, but they're comfortable using the phrase "when we do," which is veeeery promising." My personal most-wanted app? Pandora (or Slacker, or Last.FM).

Secondly, there's the more, well, illicit possibilities: The Nook both runs Android (which we already know is easily and enthusiastically modified) and has a microUSB jack, which should make for easy hacking. Imagine user-created skins, apps, games (in case reading gets boring)—the possibilities are just about endless. The Nook already supports PDF natively (yes!) but we could definitely see it hacked to embrace other formats like Word docs.

The second screen. Yeah, it's weird, and we wouldn't have believed it if it didn't, you know, exist, but it just makes so much sense: Browsing for books on e-ink is an exercise in frustration, and touchscreen e-ink is even worse. With its capacitive touchscreen, the Nook offers a keyboard and Cover-Flow-esque browsing without the awkwardness and lethargy of e-ink, but it also opens the door for multitasking. You'll be able to read a book and control your music at the same time, and because the music browser will be on the LCD screen, it won't look like e-inked crap. It should also support photo browsing and the ability to set your own wallpaper.

Battery life. The Nook's 10-day battery life may not be quite as long as the Kindle 2's 14 days, but 10 days is still insane—especially if we think about the tablets that will vie to make ebook readers obsolete. Whenever the Apple tablet is announced, you can bet its battery life will be measured in hours, not days. Plus, the Nook's battery is replaceable, always a welcome decision (you could have a spare battery, and when yours does eventually die, it's easy to replace).

Both 3G and Wi-Fi. I'm not exactly sure about the benefits of Wi-Fi right now (besides international travel, where AT&T may not work), but given the possibilities of Android, it's essential that the Nook includes it. In the future, we may want to download files bigger than ebooks—apps, games, videos, whatever—and Wi-Fi will be vital once the potential of the Nook is unlocked. Plus, there could well be Wi-Fi-only features of the kind AT&T wouldn't support: Streaming content, web browsing, VoIP, whatever. Wi-Fi is a killer feature not for what it does right now, but for what it could allow the Nook could do in the future.

Apparently the back cover pops off to get to the microSD slot. It might be thicker than the Kindle, but not enough to matter. The LCD is surprisingly nice, though the viewing angle isn't super wide or anything, as I found out trying to angle around the crowd. But yeah, it looks like what an ereader should look like.

Here's a quick touchy touchy video:

4:24: Barnes & Noble's CEO has taken the stage. He's planning on unveiling something, he says, but first, some history!

4:27: You see, Barnes & Noble has done a lot of things with paper books, evidently. All of which are tangential to the matter at hand, that ridiculous two-screened Kindle killer thing that we're all itching to lay eyes on. Sidenote: this sounds like a eulogy for paper more than anything else.

4:28: Ah, on to the ebook stuff. William Lynch, President, is here to talk about electricity and the internet and such.

4:31: Some relevant background: Barnes & Noble has over a million books in their ebook store, and have seen over three million downloads for their mobile apps. They've even decided to give a quick nod to B&N-compatible hardware from iRex and Plastic Logic, which is awfully sportsmanlike.

4:33: Yes! On with the Nook. The intro video is standard boilerplate: the screen is "crystal clear," downloads happen in "seconds." Of course you already know this.

4:36: Now we've got hardware. It exists, in spacetime! It looks smaller than I would've thought in a human being's hand. Interestingly, Android earned a shoutout—the OS was sorely missing from the prior leaked launch materials, despite that fact that it's total nerdbait.

4:38: The onscreen keyboard—on the bottom screen, natch—looks spacious but kind of gridlike, rather than staggered, which could make typing a little awkward. The bottom screen turns off when you haven't used it in a while, which makes sense: it'd kill battery life, and if you're using it for controls, you probably don't need to see it most of the time anyway.

4:40: Malcom Gladwell is here to read one of his books for a few seconds. I mean, hey, nice essays and all, but that's a strange looking man.

4:43: They're putting the Nook in all of their stores—this could be kind of a coup for them, since Amazon doesn't even have stores. This is what their giant retail displays will look like.

4:47: If you take a Nook to a brick-and-mortar store, you get free Wi-Fi, which is nice, I guess. More importantly, you get to browse an entire ebook for free each time you visit, which is sort of like a digital equivalent to shelf browsing. Sort of.

4:49: Aaaaaand that's it, at least for the tragically gutted announcement portion of tonight's proceedings. The Nook, as we expected, will ship by the end of November, and preorders will open tonight. People who were lucky enough to squeeze a preorder through earlier today know that "late November" means "November 30th."

There's a Q&A session coming up in a few minutes, so they're telling press to stay. At the same time, they're blasting the stupid "TONIGHT'S GONNA BE A GOOD NIGHT, MAZEL TOV" song, which says to me, "Go." We'll stick around, but only out of a sense of duty.

Q&A

4:56: We're back, and questions kick off with a question about ePub formats. They like it, which is why their entire catalog will switch to it when the Nook launches.

4:58: So, what about Android? They like it because it's optimized for small screens, but they're not saying a whole lot about apps. They, ahem, "haven't announced" anything about app development, but they're comfortable using the phrase "when we do," which is veeeery promising.

4:58: Says the rep about the prospect of a browser, "browsers on E ink are clumsy." Yeah! Stick it to E Ink! He's right though.

5:00: How does lending work? It'll work between any Barnes & Noble account, meaning anything with a Barnes & Noble reader app—iPhone, BlackBerry, PC, another B&N-compatible reader, etc.

5:06: Now Matt's got a question. Actually, like three: Is there anything exclusive to the Nook that you can't get in other apps? No.

And back to Android, anything else on those apps? Yeah, they're open to it, including games, but they're not making any announcements yet. (Again, promising!)

And finally, what kind of touchscreen tech does the bottom screen use? It's capacitive (but I don't think it's multitouch).

5:10: Now my turn, to follow up on this Android business, which all seems a little half-done: They've got reader apps on iPhone and BlackBerry, and now the Nook, which runs Android, so where's the Android app? "We're watching it closely" is an odd answer, but there was a tacit acknowledgment that the inconsistency seems weird. I'm reading this as a likely yes for an Android app, but there's really no way to tell when it'll come out.

5:12: And another, is there any desktop client software? No—it'll mount via microUSB, and show up as mass storage. Book transfers are intended to be wireless. USB's there for music and photo transfers, as well as charging.

5:13: They're strangely happy to say they're developing a Windows Mobile app—"we are," they say—so why so coy about Android?

5:18: Everyone's left the stage, and they're playing GO AWAY music again, so that's it. OR IS IT? (It is.)

To be clear, this is the same device we saw before—a smallish (7.7 x 4.9 x .5, it turns out) e-reader with two screens, a 6-inch E ink display up top for displaying book text, and a 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD down below for navigation.

Connectivity comes by way of free AT&T 3G as well as 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, while storage duties fall to the 2GB of internal memory, as well as an microSD expansion slot. Barnes & Noble claims charge time of 3.5 hours—by microUSB, thankfully—which'll let you read for "up to ten days," which is a curiously indirect way of describing battery life, and doesn't really say much about what "reading" means. With constant LCD use? Occasional? None? Audio playback seems limited to MP3s, with a 3.5mm headphones jack taking care of output. Say what you will about the design, but you can't fault B&N on ports.

Naturally, the main content source is the B&N ebook store, which has a reasonable—though not spectacular—selection of magazines and newspapers too. What the Nook has that other B&N-compatible readers don't, though, is sharing. As with Amazon's Kindle iPhone app, the Barnes & Noble's reader can be synced with the company's various mobile apps. Even better is the user to user sharing, which sounds an awful lot like the Zune's old "Squirting" feature, which let people sharing DRM-wrapped songs for a limited time. That said, the sharing terms are pretty generous:

Share favorite eBooks with your friends, family, or book club. Most eBooks can be lent for up to 14 days at a time. Just choose the book you want to share, then send it to your friend's reader, cell phone, or computer.

Avid readers can easily plow through all kinds of books in 14 days, so this is a pretty sweet deal.

And in a deprecating nod to the Kindle's notorious durability issues, Barnes & Noble is pushing extended warranties right out of the gate: a $70 protection plan stretches the stock warranty to two years, and throws in accidental damage coverage, meaning you don't have to worry too much about pulling a Matt, which given that this thing has two freakin' screens, is a very real worry.

So let's just get this out of the way. "Hi, I'm Kate, and this is my Nook!" Ha. Ok!

The above video does give a better sense of how the reader's control scheme works than words ever good, but I'll give it a go anyway: the only hardware buttons you'll really use are the right and left page switchers. The rest, from book library navigation to settings menus to book sharing, is managed through a separate menu system on the much more responsive (though from the looks of it, kinda jerky) color LCD. One one hand it's a clever workaround for E Ink's horrendously slow refresh rate; on the other, it's kind of hilarious. I mean, really? [B&N]

Preorders are live on B&N's site, and units should hit mailboxes on November 30th. [Last Week's Exclusive First Look]

UPDATE: Err, looks like B&N's web guys jumped the gun a little bit, and they've pulled the site. But ha, not soon enough. Eyes, feast: