Expected to ship towards the end of November, the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader has both a black-and-white e-paper display and a color touchscreen panel. In spite of rumors, the panel is not multi-touch, but you can still use it to flip through different books and documents.

Barnes & Noble will offer e-books at prices lower than their hard copy cousins through an online store, and the device will have access to Google's scanned book library.

The niftiest feature down that alley: you can take your Nook into a Barnes & Noble store and read ebooks for free over the store's Wi-Fi before buying them, just as if you were browsing through the paper and hardbacks there.

The Nook has already been pre-ordering, and it was scheduled to go on sale in Barnes & Noble stores on November 30th for $259. However, The New York Times reported on November 20th that Barnes & Noble was surprised by the volume of pre-orders, and that the Nook is sold out for the holidays. That's bittersweet for Barnes & Noble, isn't it? When this first was announced, new orders were originally scheduled to ship until January 4th. Then they were dated for January 11th. Now Barnes & Noble has pushed it back yet again; the current target date is the 15th.

On the other hand, Barnes & Noble said the Nook would be available at least for demonstration purposes in select stores starting December 7th. That actually ended up happening on December 8th, but in the world of consumer electronics a one day delay isn't that bad! Early pre-orders also began shipping on the 8th, but new orders will still not ship until January.

[Images courtesy of Engadget and Gizmodo.]