Barnes & Noble prices book Nook

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Barnes & Noble e-reader, photos of which were leaked last week, will be called “Nook” and be priced at $259, the same price as Amazon’s Kindle 2. The New York Times has roughly the same details here. Both articles are based in part on ads placed in tomorrow’s edition of the newspapers.

Most interesting is the Nook’s ability to “lend” books to other readers via wireless connection. No details on how permissive the loan capability will be—presumably the owner of the book will not be able to access a loaned title.

There’s also no information about the cost of wireless service, which is expected to be bundled with books sold through the BN.com store, similar to Kindle. But unlike Kindle, the Nook promises access to the Google Books library, which are free; will users have to pay for wireless service to get that access?

We’ll know more tomorrow.

For now, we can only wonder about the naming process that produced “Nook.” Cute, but its rhyming with “book” will confuse people about whether they want a device called a “Nook” or to buy a “nook” version of a book. For digital natives it will be pretty clear. Think about the concept your grandmother would have to wrestle when asking for an e-book at a Barnes & Noble retail store.