I triple-dog dare you to go into Barnes & Noble and not look at the Nook display. You won’t be able to do it. Though the device is all but sold out until early 2010, the monolithic in-store displays have fancy paper-cutouts in the shape of a Nook with features and specifications on them which I’m sure will be just fine wrapped and under the tree this Christmas, thank you very much.
The Nook (Technologizer’s great review here) is part of the latest gadget bubble to take hold of the elder and technorati set, the e-book reader. Like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle before it, the Nook allows you to buy books from the Barnes & Nobel store, download them via 3g nearly instantly, and begin reading. The Nook brings not much to the discussion that the other two devices haven’t covered; E-Ink screen, fancy keyboard, books and newspapers. The killer features on the Nook that are supposed to wipe out the Sony and the Kindle are, well, two.