It Looks Like The Nook Color 2 Launches On November 7
Three Barnes & Noble employees have all but confirmed that the company will release its new e-reader, the Nook Color 2, on November 7, reports The Digital Reader. — Its most direct competitor will be Amazon's upcoming Kindle Fire tablet, slated for release on November 15.
Context & Ripple Effects
Barnes & Noble has been building toward this for a year: the Android-based, full-color Nook arrived in October 2010, and by April 2011 the company had turned it into a lightweight tablet with an app store and Flash support. A successor was the obvious next step.
What is new here is the timing leak, not the product: three B&N employees have all but confirmed a November 7 launch to The Digital Reader, per Business Insider. That puts the device on shelves eight days before Amazon's Kindle Fire, whose November 15 release date is confirmed — an unusually tight head-to-head window between the two biggest names in bookselling hardware.
First-order effects
- Barnes & Noble would get its next-generation device into stores before Amazon's Kindle Fire ships, claiming the pre-holiday shelf space and the 'first cheap color tablet from a bookseller' position in buyer minds.
- The employee-sourced date leak itself signals retail-floor preparation — staff being briefed on launch logistics — meaning B&N's holiday inventory and marketing plans are already locked around this window.
Second-order effects
- Amazon now faces a competitor undercutting its announcement cycle: whatever price and specs B&N reveals on November 7 becomes the benchmark the Kindle Fire's $199-class pitch is measured against when reviews land.
- Publishers and app developers gain a second credible Android-based color storefront alongside Amazon's, forcing them to weigh dual distribution across two rival book-retailer ecosystems rather than treating Kindle as the default.
Third-order effects
- If both devices sell through the holidays, the dedicated e-reader category effectively completes its merger with the budget tablet category — with book retailers, not traditional device makers, setting the price floor.
- A two-horse race between Amazon and Barnes & Noble pushes smaller e-reader vendors toward either licensing someone else's content ecosystem or exiting hardware, concentrating the market around whoever owns the bookstore.
The trend: E-readers are converging into sub-$250 Android tablets, and the battle for that category is being fought between book retailers leveraging their content libraries rather than consumer-electronics firms.