We haven't seen a new Barnes & Noble Nook tablet or e-reader since 2018, but Lenovo is about to change that. Next week we learn that the Nook brand will be back with a tablet.

This is from The Verge, which quotes Susan McCulloch, senior director of Nook operations at Barnes & Noble.

Will this be a branded version of the Lenovo Tab P11 unveiled at CES? That remains to be seen. Unfortunately, Lenovo's last attempt at a monochrome e-ink Nook was not successful; the Nook GlowLight 3 suffered from a poor interface design and slow performance that only hindered reading.

Interestingly, the Nook's history includes a full-color tablet that was a forked version of Android and set to compete with Amazon's Fire tablet. The first Nook appeared in 2009, combining an e-ink screen with a small color touchscreen. Later, in 2010, the Barnes & Noble Nook Color tablet switched to a full-color panel.

More recently, Barnes & Noble released a $129 10.1-inch Nook; on March 17, Good e-Reader reported that all Barnes & Noble Nook e-readers had sold out.

The big question about the new Nook is how it will continue to fight the war against the current king of the field, the Amazon Kindle; the TCL Nxtpaper, which debuted at CES 2021, showed one possibility: a full-color E Ink display.

In any case, tablets as a product have evolved markedly since Barnes & Noble last introduced a competitive model. Amazon's two leading Kindles are waterproof, the iPad is going for productivity, and Samsung is attacking Apple with competitively priced models.