Barnes and Noble Nook To Hit Stores December 7

Barnes and Noble‘s popular e-reader Nook is expected to his stores in limited numbers by December 7. This is a week delay versus original schedule of November 30. The bookstore was planning to deliver the units first to customers who pre-ordered the unit before November 20.

A single unit of Nook costs $259 and is to rival Amazon‘s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.

The new announcement came as a surprise as an earlier announcement this month said that Nook is sold out through the year 2009 with January 4 as the next possible date for customers to buy the highly anticipated holiday gift item.

The Nook is the first electronic reader to be based on the Android platform initially developed by Google. It supports the following formats: .epub, .pdb, .pdf and .mp3. Its differentiating factor is the “LendMe” feature where some books are licensed by their publishers for sharing allowing the purchaser permission to share a book once, with one other user, for up to two weeks.