In the battle of electronic book readers, the winner gives the most choice to consumers, Barnes & NobleCEO William Lynch told CNBC Monday.
Source: Digitaltrends.com
Nook
That makes Nook better than Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle, he said.
"Amazon is approaching it like an Amazon vending machine. They’ve been a very successful company, but we haven’t seen yet a service in terms of aggregating people’s media across different media types," he added. "What we did was we decided to innovate on the reading platform and be the best digital reading platform."
Barnes & Noble's Nook Color, unveiled at the bookseller's Union Square store in New York City, is priced at $249 with 16 gigabytes of internal memory. It is going screen to screen against Amazon, which unveiled two new versions of its Kindle, the Touch priced at $99, and the Fire costing $199, in late September.
The Nook is expected to hit shelves late next week, around the same time Amazon will start shipping its the Kindle Fire.
Both companies are also competing against Apple's iPad with its wide array of books, magazines and other products.
Lynch didn't mention Apple, but he told CNBC the Nook offers interactive magazines and kids books, as well as services through parterships with Netflix and Pandora, among others — services a lot of people already have.
"So If you want to get all things Amazon, certainly that would be a great device for that," he said of the Kindle. "But if consumers want choice, we think the Nook tablet is the best choice."
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 quarter of the digital books market.
Brian Cooley of CNET.com discussed the Nook's competition in a CNBC interviewearlierMonday.
— Reuters contributed to this report.
