Barnes & Noble's (E)Book

Think for a moment what a book is:  it's a color wrapper designed to entice you to buy it and a center of black-and-white pages from which you consume the contents.  Now take a look at this picture of the rumored Barnes & Noble e-reader that Gizmodo released.

What a brilliant design inspiration for this electronic reader device:  the book.  B&N has used two different screens, for precisely the same reason that paper publishers use two different components in fashioning a real book.  The tools - a color wrapper designed to sell and black-and-white pages designed to consume - are both perfectly suited for their respective purposes.

Congratulations to the folks at B&N for going back to first principles and not focusing on the technologies per se but rather the purposes that they're supposed to facilitate.

I liked it so much, I bought (a very small fraction of) the company.