Barnes & Noble have finally brought out the Nook app for Android users after releasing it first on the iPhone platform. There are also talks of an update coming for the iPhone and the iPad and the Nook coming to other platforms as well. Interesting thing to note here is the fact that B&N has chosen to brand the app completely as Nook, leveraging the e-Reader brand everywhere. There’s no mention of B&N on the app and it sports a clean and trendy finish that would appeal to all. The app support starts from Android 1.6.

Features of the app are pretty much what you can expect. Once you have it installed, you can read books from the B&N catalogue available through the Nook. You can of course access the online store and purchase books from there. Once an app is installed, you can access your library of books from anywhere and any device.

There’s one interesting feature that the company is highlighting and that is the LendMe feature. You can lend out eligible books for up to 14 days to your friends. But the feature seems more like a gimmick than a feature to me because you can lend out one book only once and that too only eligible ones. So it is pretty restrictive. Seems like the trade-off of going digital is not being able to exchange books between friends. For people who connect over words, this is going to be isolating socially.

Moving on, B&N has the nook app all over the digital realm — including your desktop. So you can easily access the whole library from your workstations and laptops as well. This is fully like the Kindle strategy that gives you the option of covering all your devices with Kindle reading apps. This also leverages their hardware sales at the end of the day and all of this is also what B&N is looking at.

[via]