Well, the Wall Street Journal got a hold of a full page ad that Barnes and Noble will be running the New York Times Book section on Sunday (journalism today is so incestuous), and the Ereader is now out of the bag.

Lets see how the rumor mill did this time around, shall we?

• The device WILL be announced on today as expected and will likely be available in stores by the end of the week.
• It WILL allow you to trade books with other readers.
• It WILL be available for testing and purchase in B&N stores and can also be bought online (though I have gotten reports it will also be sold at Best Buy)
• It WILL have dual screens one of which WILL be a color touch screen, it WILL be priced to compete with the Kindle ($259).
• It WON’T be called the Athena, or the Alex, or the Alexa.

It will be called the Nook.

CLANG

NOOK?

“Hey baby, is this your Nook? Now I know what the touch screen is for …hahasnort. You take this to bed with you every night huh? You keep it in the bedside table, right?”

“Just get out, you philistine…SLAM”

…Sorry, had to get that out of my system.

OK, lets ignore for now the tide of “Nookie” and “Reading in Bed” jokes that will soon descend on us like rice at your Cousin Ruthie’s wedding. I get the whole connection to books…a reading nook, somewhere nice and quiet and cozy…lovely image. However, it could also apply to breakfast. Not so lovely an image. Think what a little maple syrup could do to one of these poor devices. One never likes a gooey touchscreen.

Nook, huh? To be fair, if they were hunting for a term that made you think of reading or books, there were so many others to choose from that would have been equally if not more humiliating. The Worm, for example, or the Hack, or the Pulp, or the Remainder. The Publisher’s Overstock? Maybe the “Review Copy. Not for Resale”. I suppose they could have done worse than Nook. Tough to credit, but I am sure they could have.

After all, their main competitor is named for a way to start a fire. 

I will definitely be getting one, but I refuse to call it my Nook, I just refuse.

UPDATE: Teleread.org will be live blogging the B&N Event and news conference beginning at 4pm EST

(Thanks to Dear Author for the tweet-tip)

Zealot (471 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).