Nook Color: the latest in e-reading. And dancing.

I hesitate to even mention this because these kinds of reports about “the next big thing” about to come out amount to little more than rote transcriptions of press releases that include device specs and are finished off with a few points of analysis regarding “what it all means,” feeding into the buzz-hype-machine-feedback loop that results in a noise so perversely brain-numbing that at the end of it all you’re left wondering how you’ll ever be able to live without this “next big thing.” But I’m going to do it anyway, because there’s more happening here than just the release of a device.

Yesterday the news in e-reader land was focused on the new “Nook Color” from Barnes and Noble. Leapfrogging over Amazon’s Kindle (for now), the new Nook has a full-color LCD touchscreen and uses the Android operating system. It will have full internet and video capability and be, for all intents and purposes, a standard tablet, albeit one that’s tricked out for e-reading. According to Crunch Gear’s live-blogging from the announcement event, B&N has lined up several app developers such as Lonely Planet and Dictionary.com to focus on “reading-centric” apps.

Okay, so it’s a cheap tablet. Big deal. Well, maybe it really is. Fast Company seems to think so. In Austin Carr’s post in advance of the event, he ventured that if it’s cheap, light, as functional as an iPad (or approaching similar functionality), has long-ish battery life, and has a good reading experience, it could spell “the death of the Kindle.” We’ll see. Regardless, the news of this device was no surprise to anyone (favorite headline for coverage goes to Crunch Gear: “Barnes &Noble Reveals The Nook Color, Please Act Surprised“). With e-book and enhanced e-book sales seeing exponential growth, there couldn’t but be a new Nook with all these bells and whistles.

Go, e-dog, go!

The bigger news probably came on Monday when Barnes and Noble announced the launch of “Nook Kids.” In Jeffrey Trachtenberg’s report in the Wall Street Journal, he reported that when Nook Kids goes live this Sunday there will be 12,000 chapter book titles, 100 picture books by mid-November, and 30 enhanced e-books by the end of the year. (One wonders why the large discrepancy here between picture and chapter books–hopefully it has less to do with children reading fewer picture books and more to do with the fact that enhanced picture books are going to take a lot longer to produce.)

Whatever the real value may be of recent surveys touting higher rates of reading among kids with e-readers, B&N is clearly doubling down on creating a new virtual reading universe–one that resembles their in-store experience where you can also browse and buy books, magazines and music (another interesting point about the new Nook: there’s no access to the Android Marketplace). And they are putting kids front and center of that strategy. Whether or not they’re trying to kill the Kindle in the short term, they’re clearly taking the long view by creating so much content aimed at children. If it’s true that young people are, at best, device agnostic when it comes to reading or, at worst, prefer e-readers to physical books, B&N wants to ensure they’re staying ahead of the market and conditioning kids to like their product. Makes perfect business sense.

Advice for people who work at B&N stores right now: learn how to code for the Nook. It’s about to close your store and put you out of a job.