New Nook Tablet from Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble unveiled a $249 Nook Tablet Monday just ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season as the book retailer fights for a larger share of the lucrative e-book market.

Tablets and e-book readers are going to be flying off the shelves before the holidays, and both Barnes & Noble Inc. and Amazon are hoping to challenge Apple and its dominant iPad for a piece of the holiday pie. The Nook Tablet arrived just weeks after Amazon.com released its $199 Kindle Fire tablet. Barnes & Noble conceded on price while offering more memory and a product that it says has a longer battery life than the Kindle Fire.

But it cut the price on its Nook Color, which doesn't have streaming services, to $199, from $239. It cut the price for its Nook Simple Touch Reader, a black-and-white reader that doesn't have a browser, to $99 from $139.

The Nook Tablet will be in stores and shipped to homes on Nov. 17. Like the Nook Color, it has a 7-inch color touch-screen. The tablet will also come preloaded with apps from Netflix and Hulu.

Since introducing its first Nook in 2009, Barnes & Noble has spent heavily on its e-book readers and e-bookstore as people change the way they read, and also to fight off tough competition from discounters and online retailers. The New York company has struggled to turn a profit and saw its rival, Borders Group Inc., seek bankruptcy protection and then liquidate its assets. In its most recent quarter Barnes & Noble reported a narrower loss as revenue edged up 2 percent to $1.42 billion.

The Nook Tablet weighs less than a pound, has a battery life that enables nine hours of video watching and comes with 16 gigabytes of memory with an expandable SD slot to add memory.