Barnes & Noble launches new tablet

NEW YORK - Barnes & Noble Inc. introduced its first tablet on Monday, taking direct aim at Amazon.com Inc in a holiday tussle for market share at the lower end of the tablet market.

Barnes & Noble will charge $249 for the Nook tablet, which is expected to hit the shelves late next week. That compares to the $199 price tag on Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, which ships Nov 15.

The Nook tablet has a 7-inch screen, comes with 16 gigabytes of storage, weighs less than one pound, offers nine hours of video viewing and works with Netflix Inc video libraries and the Hulu Plus streaming service, Barnes & Noble said on Monday.

Chief Executive William Lynch called the 8 gigabytes of storage offered by Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet “deficient.”

The new Nook also has a 1GHz dual-core processor and one gigabyte of RAM, Barnes & Noble added.

Barnes & Noble has faced years of shrinking book sales, so it has invested tens of millions of dollars to develop the Nook to reinvent itself as readers move to digital formats. It claims to now have about a fourth of the digital-books market.

The company’s shares were down 3 cents at $11.64 on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock slumped on Sept. 28 after Amazon unveiled its tablet at a lower price than Barnes & Noble’s top e-reader at the time, the Nook Color.

Barnes & Noble CEO Lynch said on Monday that the company is pursuing an “open” content strategy with its new tablet, which he said was different from Amazon’s approach.

“The Kindle Fire is a vending machine for Amazon’s services,” Lynch said. “They’re trying to lock people into their ecosystem. We, on the other hand, have chosen to be open.”

Referring to the higher price tag of the Nook tablet, Lynch said bigger memory is worth $20 of the $50 difference between the Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble device.

Barnes & Noble also cut the price of its e-reader devices to compete with Amazon, which lowered the price of its Kindle e-readers earlier in September.

The Nook Color will be $199 instead of $249, while the Nook Simple Touch costs $99, without ads, down from $139.

Amazon priced its entry-level Kindle e-reader recently at $79, with ads, and $109 without special offers.