Barnes & Noble sells its own eBook device, the NOOK, which it’s been pushing through special manned booths at its retail locations as well as online. But now the bookseller is hedging its e-book bets with the introduction of an e-reader for Apple’s iPad. The application is now available at the Apple (News - Alert) App Store.

The bookseller says customers can in less than a minute install the eReader and sign into their BN.com accounts. That will give them access to more than 1 million e-books, newspapers and magazines; free samples of e-books anytime, plus thousands of free titles; access to their e-book libraries via computer plus hundreds of mobile devices including not only the iPad, but also the iPhone (News - Alert), and the NOOK; eight “beautiful” fonts and five text sizes to select from, plus adjustable margins; millions of colors for text, highlights, links, and pages; a gallery of specially-designed themes, and the ability to design their own themes; the capability to share e-books with friends using the free LendMe feature; the ability to look up words with the built-in dictionary, or search on Wikipedia and Google (News - Alert); and more.

However, one story says that “if you're looking for the flashy page-turning animations you'll find in Apple's iBooks app for the iPad, you'll be disappointed.”

As for The NOOK, which came out last year and was sold out by Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, it features the first Android (News - Alert)-based operating system, with a color touch screen for navigation and 3G wireless access on AT&T’s mobile broadband network.

Of course this device competes with the Amazon Kindle, the device that really made the e-reader a new product category. And, as this story reflects, the NOOK is now challenged as well by the recent introduction by Apple of the iPad, a device for which the e-reader is just one of many applications.