Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch yesterday launched two new Nook devices which open the door to the downloading and watching of films [3]. This was smartly followed by a broadside against Amazon [4], the behemoth which B&N's e-readers are up against--hence the foray into video. "We are obviously a reading company," he told reporters at the firm's presser in New York yesterday. "We find it offensive if you are disappearing into a book, to be assaulted by an ad."

The Nook HD and Nook HD+ are both obviously aimed to topple the Kindle Fire's perceived supremacy as the e-reader plus du choix, as well as have a go at Google's Nexus 7 tablet. And then there's the video service [5], which allows users to buy and watch movies from Warner Brothers, Viacom, HBO, and Sony Pictures. As well as looking good, the Android-running Nook performs better in some areas. Higher resolution, reports [6] The Verge, alongside some clever apps and ingenious ways to share content on other devices. The larger HD+ is cheaper than the equivalent Kindle Fire, but the smaller HD loses out on memory size to its Amazon counterpart.

Earlier this year, the firm announced a $300 million hookup [7] with Microsoft, but this investment hadn't, said Lynch, influenced the new readers as the deal had not yet been finalized.