B&N's Nook-A Battle in E-Reader Market?

The most exciting news in the past week is the official announcement of B&N's E-Reader Nook.

David Coursey from PC World lists 5 reasons that Nook will be a Kindle killer, and the reasons show that the Nook actually does satisfy many certain user needs which Kindle fails to offer.

Highlight some of the features here:

More Books:
Nook offers more titles than Amazon, and can access 500,0000 books in public domain from Google while Kindle users only can buy Kindle-version ebooks from Amazon.

Read your own PDF from Nook:
Being a graduate student, we have lots of paper to read. Kindle does not support users to load PDF documents from PC which limits the power of E-reader. And Nook supports the function.

Loan-able e-Books: Nook users can loan their e-books for 14 days at a time to other Nook owners as well as iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, and PC devices running free B&N reader software.

The function can be very attractive. I just had this class discussion that a student of my class mentioned that people cannot borrow books from Kindle users unless you borrow the Kindle itself. But I guess everyone love to share after reading a good book. So it will be a barrier if you can't lend the book to someone else.

However, it should be noticed that the Nook "loan-able" can only transact between Nook users.

Storefronts: It's really easy to stop by a B & N bookstore and potential customers can try out a Nook.

While Ballmer says No to E-Reader and states that PC is the best reader ever, nobody knows if Microsoft is rejecting a potential large market. However, Google will launch its Google Editions, a Ebook store supporting multiple devices in 2010.

With the good assumption that we can buy E-reader at cheaper prices in the future but what still remains skeptical to me is how large the market is? The book lovers always appreciate the touch of book pages and the smell of inks and the ownership of a printed book. E-reader almost ruins everything. And for the rest of the world, they are not that into book reading. Probably, they will find converged tool more attractive, such as SmartPhone with limited reading function, or Mp4 player such as iTouch, or Gameboy such as SONY PSP.