Barnes & Noble may be changing its Android tablet strategy, but the company is still pushing its NOOK digital bookstore… and hardware for reading those eBooks. The company’s expected to launch a new eReader soon, and may have a few more tablets in the works as well.

The next-generation NOOK showed up at the FCC website over the weekend, and while it looks a lot like the company’s existing products, there’s at least one improvement.

The new NOOK appears to have 4GB of built-in storage, which is twice as much as you get with a NOOK Simple Touch or NOOK Simple Touch With GlowLight.

It’s not clear if there are any other major hardware changes at this point, but if 2GB is enough space to hold about 1,000 eBooks, it looks like you’ll be able to store about 2,000 books on the new NOOK device.

Of course, you probably don’t actually need to carry that many eBooks around with you. You can backup part of your book collection to your computer, and you can always re-download titles purchased from B&N (as long as the company doesn’t go out of business).

And while some folks like to have very big libraries, the truth is that if you read about a book a week on average, it’d take you 38 years to read that many titles. Somehow I doubt this particular device will actually last that long, no matter how durable it is.

It’s possible that B&N isn’t just upping the storage as a gimmick though. Perhaps the new NOOK will support audiobooks, comic books, or other content that takes up more space than digital books which are little more than formatted text files.

Or maybe it’s just a gimmick.

via Wireless Goodness

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