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.

Morningstar analyst Peter Wahlstrom said the tablet appears solid and that most features were expected as part of the next iteration of the Nook Color. "At $249, it gives Barnes & Noble customers or potential customers enough to think hard about which device they want," he said.

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.