B&N’s double-duty e-reader

Gizmodo has photos of the new Barnes & Noble e-reader, which will be announced next week. Apparently after running a blurb on the B&N announcement, Gizmodo got the “scoop” direct from B&N PR, because they have a nice set of professional product shots to show you. The news is not news, but staged product release. Fast Company picked up the story and calls the unnamed gadget “more exciting” than most of the dedicated e-readers on the market, as it sports a touch LCD screen below the E-Ink display to facilitate greater interactivity, with color.

The B&N device is intriguing for several positives and an inadvertently negative reason. First, the positives:

The device will run Google’s Android OS, which implies it will have a variety of capabilities beyond simply displaying books. Fast Company suggests users will have “social chat” within books via the LCD screen. I think we like to concentrate when we read, so the kind of chat seen on Twitter or instant messaging would be interruptive. However, if the screen facilitates embedding of comments from friends, which could be entered on the LCD screen and conveyed to an insertion point in the text for later, non-interruptive access, that could be incredibly cool.

The LCD does offer a solution to the lack of interactivity in E-Ink-only devices, but it is much more likely to be useful for playing audio books, shopping for books (clearly a greatly enhanced experience with color and a refresh rate faster than ice melts), and non-book functionality. Here’s the negative side: It is just one of many solutions, though, and the dual-screen form factor seems to scream “this device isn’t big enough for our business model and your needs as a reader.”

The touch screen will make typing much easier than on a Kindle, but isn’t the stark similarity between the LCD portion of the B&N e-reader and an iPhone or iPod Touch underlining what an e-book reader doesn’t do? Should the device ship with Google’s Talk Voice over IP (VoIP) application and a combination of Wi-Fi and mobile data service, that would actually be revolutionary. But why, then, buy an e-reader and not a smartphone if the essential benefit of either is the LCD screen?

I’m actually eager to see this e-reader for myself. Until then, when we will know the price and its actual capabilities, we can only speculate about its ability to disrupt the market. Given the popular belief that e-readers must be cheaper than $100 to win a mass audience, it’s unlikely the B&N e-reader will do all the cool things it needs to to be really revolutionary.

Finally, let’s do remember that B&N is a retailer and discount publisher, not a hardware company. It’s entering a business it does not comprehend, because prevailing opinion says everyone needs to have their own e-reader hardware offering. Amazon’s Kindle, as I’ve written many times, is a temporary phenomenon tied to extending Amazon’s ability to retail books. Both the B&N and Amazon hardware businesses are kick-starting efforts designed to drive the providers’ e-book retailing business, and not likely to result in long-lived hardware products.

We don’t drive cars made by Chevron and Ford doesn’t build cars that burn only one brand of gas.