Marvel Cozies Up All In Your Nook

Yesterday, Barnes & Noble announced that they’ll be releasing the newest version of their Nook e-reader, the Nook Tablet (which sounds like something you take for a particularly virulent yeast infection) next Friday, November 18th. It’ll have a dual core chip, a gig of ram with 16 gig of onboard storage, integrated Netflix and Hulu Plus apps, and… something else…

Marvel Entertainment announced today that the hotly-anticipated NOOK Tablet from Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) will offer readers access to the greatest graphic novels of all time.

Wow! Marvel’s releasing Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns?

Featuring the Avengers, Spider-Man, Wolverine and more of the world’s most popular super heroes, NOOK Tablet launches with a digital library of your favorite Marvel graphic novels—and more of your favorite stories are on the way!

Oh, okay. Those are pretty good, too.

We haven’t been able to find a complete list of what Marvel books will be available on the Nook, although the hype pages are showing the original run of Ultimate Spider-Man, Ed Brubaker’s Captain America, J. Michael Straczynski’s Thor, Mark Millar’s Civil War and Kurt Busiek’s and Alex Ross’s classic Marvels. We also haven’t been able to figure out if the books will be available through some Nook-specific version of Marvel’s Android app (Which would imply that the books will be portable across devices), or strictly as individual ebook purchases tied to the Nook (Yes… tied…).

But what we have figured out is that this announcement could be the beginning of the end of digital comics – or at least a major roadblock to their adoption – if the Big Two don’t get their shit together.

Considering that it’s only been a month since DC Comics announced that they’ll be releasing a bunch of their graphic novels – yes, including Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns – exclusively on the upcoming Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, it looks like what we got here is a good old-fashioned format war. You know, the kind that made household names of HD-DVD, Minidisc and Betamax.

On one hand, it’s probably a good thing that it will now be possible to get Marvel comics via an easy online app in a truly portable format on a reasonably-priced platform (The Nook Tablet will be $250, with the current Nook Color – which will also feature the Marvel books – dropping to $200). On the other hand, it will continue to be impossible for people who own the Nook Tablet to get the DC Comics they as comics fans will want (Sweaty douchebags at SDCC who snort at my Flash t-shirt and mutter “Quicksilver could kick Flash’s hrmm durm buh so lonely” aside) unless they root the thing and install the DC Android app… and it’s too early to tell if the Nook Tablet will be rooted as easily as the Nook Color.

Which means that realistically, neither the Nook nor the Kindle will be truly ubiquitous platforms for true comics fans, and where does that lead? Yup: the iPad, which already has easily-installed apps for all the major comics publishers, which will be attractive to those who think that “rooting the device” somehow involves your wang. Which means that comics becomes yet another media industry forced to suck Steve Jobs off to survive, and proving once again that comics people have the worst timing ever.

With that said, I am interested to see how this will work. I, personally, am a Nook man… and I also own the Barnes & Noble ereader (BOOM!). So after these books go on sale on the Nook Bookstore next week, I’ll grab one and tell you how it goes and what the experience is like so you can decide if it’s worth the effort… provided I don’t get distracted by all this talk about Nooks and decide to try and “root the device.”

(Nook picture via Agent M)