Circle October 20th on your calendars folks. Barnes & Noble sent out invitations to the media for a New York-based event on that day – a day most suspect will be the official unveiling of Barnes & Noble’s entry into the e-reader market.

The media has been buzzing about this ever since the Wall Street Journal and Gizmodo reported last Thursday that B&N was planning to enter the market with their own 6 inch touch-screen device based around the Google Android OS to compete against Amazon and Sony. 

While B&N entering the e-reader market isn’t necessarily a surprise, what is surprising is the rumor about the possible use of Android as the OS. This certainly opens the device to many more possibilities in terms of features and specifications. What exactly could we be dealing with here is quite fascinating. Think of it – the device could actually have a useful web browser built in. It could possibly leverage the thousands of applications that are now showing up for the Android OS. The possibilities to what this device could accomplish are possibly endless.

Of course, I might be dreaming here.. so I’ll stop with the second guessing until the day of the announcement. B&N after-all is still in the book/media business so I should keep my expectations at a minimum… (but I can dream right?)

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