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Earlier this morning, Barnes & Noble revealed NOOKstudy, a new software e-reader for Mac and Windows that focuses on making electronic textbooks more useful. Barnes & Noble developed this software with input from students and universities. NOOKstudy will allow students to read and annotate textbooks, as well as store copies of their syllabi, lecture notes and other course-related documents. The software, which will be available for free, is scheduled to ship in August.

Before the e-reader wars, Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook e-readers were $259. Then B&N dropped the Nook to $199 and lowering its lower-end Wi-Fi version to $149. Amazon then dropped the Kindle's price to $189. All the while, Borders stood in the background paring its nails. Border's e-reader, the Kobo, has stayed steady at $149.99 and its smaller version, the Libre, at $119. Borders believes that's the right place for the e-reader to be.

"According to Boston Consulting Group, high prices continue to be a barrier to eReader adoption. The consumer sweet spot for eReader cost (is) between $100 and $150. This positions Borders for strong consumer adoption and market penetration."

Amazon just dropped the price of its Kindle e-reader to $189. This move comes just a few hours after B&N announced the launch of its WiFi-only Nook for $149 and reduced the price of its 3G-enabled version of the Nook to $189. No doubt, Amazon's price drop is a direct reaction to B&N's attack on Amazon's Kindle business and it will be interesting to see how B&N will react to Amazon's new challenge.

Barnes & Noble just announced the launch of a Wi-Fi-only version of its Nook e-book reader. This new version of the Nook will retail for $149. In addition, B&N also dropped the price of the 3G-enabled Nook to $199. Besides being Wi-Fi-only, the new version of the Nook is virtually identical to the Nook 3G. It will come with the same set of features as the original Nook, including the ability to lend some e-books to friends and use B&N's "Read in Store" feature to browse complete books on the Nook while using B&N's in-store Wi-Fi network.

Borders is getting ready to jump into the e-book market. The company, which is second-largest chain of bookstores in the U.S., started taking pre-orders for a $119 e-book reader from Aluratek today. Last month, the company started taking pre-orders for the $149 Kobo e-reader. Borders also announced that it is on track to launch its long-awaited e-book store and mobile e-reader apps for the iPhone OS later this month. While Borders' competitors like Barnes & Noble and Amazon have long made e-books a central part of their business strategies, Borders has struggled to enter this market.

Exactly one week after the announcement of its nook e-book reader, Barnes & Noble today announced that it will also sell the Plastic Logic QUE proReader. The QUE will be sold next to the bookseller's own nook on BN.com and in B&N's stores. Earlier this year, B&N and Plastic Logic announced that B&N would power the QUE reader's online store. The proReader is scheduled to premiere on January 7. For the crucial holiday season, this means that B&N will be able to sell its own e-reader only in its stores, though a B&N-powered iRex eReader will soon be available in Best Buy stores as well.

Barnes and Noble will launch its rumored Nook eBook reader later today at an event in New York City. Thanks to an early leak of the device on the B&N Web site, however, we already know most of the details about the Nook. We can now confirm, for example, that the Nook will retail for $259 and that it will feature two screens: a small LCD touchscreen at the bottom of the device and a standard 6-inch eInk display above the smaller screen. The Nook will be available for pre-order today and will ship on November 30. One of the most interesting aspects about the device, besides the two screens, the 2 gigabytes of on-board memory and the microSD card slot, is that B&N will allow users to lend books to their friends.

Spring Design, a relatively unknown hardware design company, just announced that it will enter the eBook market with a dual-screen eReader based on the Android operating system. This device, the 'Alex,' will combine a 6-inch eInk display with a 3.5-inch color LCD touchscreen. According to Spring Design's press release, the company will use an 'enhanced' version of the Android OS that has been optimized to facilitate the integration between the two screens. Spring Design plans to release this device later this year.

When Barnes & Noble launched its eBook store, it immediately attracted a lot of potential customers. According to Compete's Dillon McGovern, more than four times as many people visited the eBook section on B&N's website than the Amazon Kindle store during the first week after the launch in July. After just about a month, though, these numbers returned to normality and today Amazon once again leads the pack by a very wide margin. While B&N was able to attract a lot of interest in its new eBook offerings, it was clearly hurt by the fact that it didn't offer users a hardware eReader yet.

EBooks and eReaders are a hot topic right now, especially with the new line-up of Kindle competitors scheduled to arrive before the holiday season. However, according to a new report by Forrester Research's Sarah Rotman Epps, most people aren't willing to pay a lot for these devices. Forrester asked consumers at what price they would consider an eReader expensive but still buy it. The answer was generally somewhere between $50 and $99.