This St. Patrick’s Day, Barnes & Noble is trying to toss a little luck into its tech line. The major bookseller is launching its new 8.7-inch NOOK Reading Tablet on March 17, complete with Android 15, 64GB of storage, a color display, and a set of built-in reading modes. It sounds like the next refreshing e-reader moment — that is, until you realize that the display is an IPS LCD panel.

It’s not exactly the device that e-reader enthusiasts have been asking for — especially the dedicated NOOK users waiting on a real E Ink comeback. The GlowLight 4 Plus did arrive in 2023, but it wasn’t the generational gamechanger that could’ve pulled fans away from Kindle or Kobo.

With its new NOOK Reading Tablet 8.7, Barnes & Noble is hedging to please everyone. What it may actually do is isolate an essential group of people in the reading world: E Ink loyalists.

Brand

Barnes & Noble

Storage

64GB

Operating System

Android 15 with NOOK Tablet experience

Battery

16.5 hours

Barnes & Noble’s latest versatile tablet has a reading focus but offers a versatile budget tablet experience with Android 15 and a bright, color display for various formats. 

What is the NOOK Reading Tablet 8.7?

Specs and speculation

You can preorder Barnes and Noble’s new NOOK for $150. It will be available in two colors at launch: Seafoam Green and Luna Grey.

With a multitouch IPS LCD screen, the new NOOK is a traditional, backlit tablet with up to 400 nits of brightness (some reports peg it higher) and 8.7 inches of screen real estate. It runs Android 15 with the NOOK Tablet experience and offers up to 16.5 hours of battery life — a consequence of its LCD screen. E Ink devices, on the other hand, don’t consume nearly as much power.

Even though the screen isn’t E Ink, the NOOK Reading Tablet 8.7 boasts built-in Reading Modes — Grayscale, Chromatic, and Immersive — to bring the display as close as possible to it. So, if you aren’t reading something colorful (say, a graphic novel), you can dial back the colors to something a bit calmer. But it’s still a LCD screen, and Barnes & Noble can’t deny that.

Obviously, the NOOK Reading Tablet isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill e-reader. It runs Android 15 (and the NOOK Tablet experience), so users can access the Google Play Store and download various apps. The color capabilities won’t restrict readers to just traditional e-books, inviting magazines, manga, and more to the experience. The tablet also sports a front and back camera, which definitely isn’t a feature on Kindle or Kobo e-readers.

Barnes & Noble is trying to please everyone

Instead of committing to one lane

Barnes & Noble is trying to push this device onto readers’ desks, but it’s a tablet wearing an e-reader’s clothing. The fundamental appeal of e-readers is their distraction-free nature, which avoids any chance of steering you away from the book in your hands. If anything, this NOOK feels more like Amazon’s Kindle Fire than a dedicated reading tool at all. When a “reading device” starts adding bells and whistles that invite other activities into the equation, it renounces its dedicated “reading” purpose.

Additionally, it’s important to note that Barnes & Noble sidestepped the E Ink display that competition like Kindle and Kobo are known for, leaving readers itching for a paper-like display hanging yet again. E Ink is popular because of its seemingly everlasting battery life, ease on the eyes, and fantastic mimicry of real paper — not to mention, slower refreshes that actually make you slow down without losing any momentum in your reading session.

Barnes & Noble should’ve given the NOOK GlowLight E Ink line a well-deserved refresh instead. Done right, an upgrade could’ve made a dent in the grip Kindle and Kobo have on the e-reader market.

But for now, at $150, the NOOK Reading Tablet 8.7 is a device that does a little bit of everything for a good price. But “jack of all trades, master of none” is what will keep Barnes & Noble from gaining any real ground in the e-reader space.