For those of you who don’t know, the Nook is Barnes & Noble’s new eBook reader. It was announced this week, and despite the goofy name, it has instantly shot to the top of my holiday wish list, although it’s at least as much about what I think the Nook represents as the product itself.

A nap nook - my second favorite kind of nook.

See, the whole concept of an eBook reader has been hamstrung from the start by the lack of a common, open format. There are plenty of other hurdles: the lack of color screens, the incredibly slow refresh rates of E-Ink displays, the high cost of adoption. But the real setback in my mind has always been the fact that a physical book doesn’t limit who can read it, or where, or when. You can lend a book to a friend. You can sit in a bookstore and leaf through a book before purchasing. If you buy your books from Barnes&Noble, and your friend buys their books from Borders, that doesn’t mean you can never read your friends books, or vice versa.

A good analogy is the mp3 player. The file format mp3 came along while the only way to consume digital music was still off of physical discs that spun around and were read by “lasers.” But thanks to the internets, and small hard drive space, the mp3 format took off, followed by hardware mp3 players. Think about it: they’re called mp3 players, not emusic players. By the time Apple rolled around to dominate the market, as much as they wanted to use their own fancy proprietary format (AAC), every iThing supports mp3 files. Even the music you buy through iTunes or Amazon can be had DRM-free and device-agnostic.

This has not been the case with ebook readers. Amazon’s Kindle uses their own special format that nobody else can use. If you want to read some other type of file on a Kindle, like a PDF, you have to use their special file conversion software to work some voodoo magic and have it anointed by Bezos blood before it can pass through the fiery tunnel of Whispersync and reach your device. And that’s IF that other file type is supported.

So, why am I excited about the Nook? Because it looks like maybe the final puzzle piece that will topple the ebook format quagmire. The Nook uses the EPUB format, an open format which has also been embraced by Google’s vast store of digitized books, as well as Sony who recently converted their entire store to the format. This essentially leaves the Kindle as the lone proprietary ebook store. And while Google and Sony jumped on the epub bandwagon first, Barnes&Noble is in a unique position to actually compete with Amazon for content. Any ebook reader that comes out from now on will basically be required by market forces to support epub, and from there the road gets a lot smoother.

But that isn’t all. B&N is uniquely taking advantage of their brick-and-mortar stores to do some very booklike things that have been glaringly absent from the current options. You’ll now be able to lend ebooks to a friend for a short period of time (although  how many times you can lend a book, or to how many different people, is in question. This thread says that it will be very restrictive, but things can always change. Better to start heavy-handed and get looser than the other way around). You’ll also be able to take your Nook to a B&N and read a book from their online store right on your device, without purchasing. I think this is brilliant, since it really addresses how people actually shop for and handle books. There’s also a great licensing opportunity here. Much like Amazon allows anyone to sell an item through their online store, B&N (or someone else, Borders perhaps) could allow other bookstores to sell digital content through the B&N store and offer similar in-store reading and lending opportunities. Boutique bookstores could actually have a chance to draw customers back to their stores thanks to an ebook reader. I’m not saying it will happen, but it could.

The Nook also has some other nerd-lovable features. To get around the slow refresh, grayscale limitations of E-ink, there’s a capacitive touchscreen LCD at the bottom to help you navigate your library of books and other control features. On top of that, the device is powered by Google’s open mobile OS Android. These two things could open up a world of possibilities. Just a few mundane thoughts: a Pandora app to stream music while you read, or a twitter app to comment on what you’re reading. What I’d really love to see, though, is a coverflow-like page skimmer. It’s already been noted that the Nook will feature a coverflow interface for browsing your books to identify them by the cover, but how about while reading being able to “flip” through pages? One of the biggest inadequacies of ebook readers until now has been poor navigation, the loss of being able to easily jump forward and backward through a novel to find a particular passage based on your memory of physically where it was located in the book. I might cry with joy when I am able to flick through miniature pages on the touchscreen to navigate whatever I’m reading. This might not be available on the Nook when it first hits stores, but it will get there eventually. I’d put money on it.

Should you buy a Nook? There’s still the problem of the cost ($259 upfront, plus buying new books). And even though the content pool has gotten a lot bigger, there’s still a lot not available, including newspapers and out-of-print material. And there are other potential winners coming from companies like Plastic Logic (who have partnered with B&N) and Apple that will have bigger screens, maybe full color, and who knows whatever other features. The Nook is certainly not the perfect ebook reader, and it will get surpassed, but I think it will be the first to break open the ebook floodgates to the public, which is reason enough for an early adopter like me to jump on board.