The Nook won't be the only e-reader on display at Barnes & Noble stores next year, as the bookseller will also offer Plastic Logic's business-oriented Que.
The Que is an 8.5- by 11-inch e-reader that supports PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Its large touch screen (and presumably premium price) are aimed towards wealthy business-people. The Nook, on the other hand, is priced to rival Amazon's Kindle at $259, with a 6-inch E-ink display and small color touch screen for navigation. It supports PDFs, but is geared mostly towards reading books. Both e-readers can access Barnes & Noble's digital book store, obviously.
Barnes & Noble has shared a few more details on how it will market both e-readers at its brick-and-mortar locations. A press release speaks of "free-standing displays with signage offering Barnes & Noble customers choice based on their reading needs." However, it doesn't seem that Barnes & Noble plans to aggressively market the Nook everywhere; a spokeswoman tells PaidContent that only the highest-volume stores will have the elaborate set-ups pictured above, and some stores won't get the Nook at all until next year, when the Que is also due to arrive.
What's interesting about the dual e-reader strategy is that Barnes & Noble happily uses hardware to sell software -- that is, its library of e-books. I'm reminded of how Apple has adopted the opposite strategy with its gadgets, using the App Store to sell iPhones and using iTunes to sell iPods. Even Amazon has established a sizable e-book store to attract customers to its Kindle e-reader.
But Barnes & Noble is primarily in the book business, and it seems the intent with the Nook and the Que is to keep it that way.
