Barnes & Noble recently announced its Nook HD tablet for $199 with 7-inch screen and with 8 gigabytes of memory along with the 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet for $299 with 32 GB of memory. This move is clearly designed to counter what Amazon is doing with the Kindle Fire and Apple is doing with the iPad.

“A key growth area is to get their existing customer base onto the digital platform,” said Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

Barnes & Noble has added features that will allow each a family to share a Nook tablet. Users will be able to create their own home page and customize preferences along with parental controls that can prevent kids from reading Fifty Shades of Grey or go shopping on the digital store.

The company also emphasized features such as image resolution and page-turning technology for their book and magazine readers. “We are playing in the tablet space, but reading is at our core,” said Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch.

Barnes & Noble says it will make sure that Nook devices will properly allow for reading in the dark. Despite a bruising price war with Amazon, the company expects brisk sales for the Nook this holiday.

“We’re growing the digital content portion of the business, and that’s where we envision making our economics,” said Lynch. “We believe we’ll gain significant share in the tablet category, and we’ve planned for that from a production standpoint. I believe these are going to be hot holiday gifts.”

Source: Reuters.com

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