Barnes & Noble and Samsung announced on Thursday they will team up to create a new co-branded Nook tablet in the hopes of breathing life into the struggling brand and better compete against Amazon's Kindle line.
The co-branded tablet will be called the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 NOOK tablet and will feature a combination of the Samsung Galaxy tablet experience with that of the NOOK software.
"We are very excited and proud to partner with Samsung, a world-class technology and tablet leader, to create customized co-branded devices featuring our valuable NOOK reading experience and digital content catalog for Barnes & Noble customers nationwide," CEO Michael P. Huseby said. "Partnering with Samsung brings our customers great new products and evidences our commitment to our NOOK customers and growing our digital content business."
The first model, which will be a 7-inch version, is expected to hit Barnes & Noble physical and online stores beginning in August. No price for the tablet has been announced, but B&N noted that they will continue to sell their other NOOK models of eReaders.
According to Reuters, the struggling bookseller agreed to buy 1 million of the new tablets from Samsung over the first year of availability, but that can be stretched to a period of 15 months, if sales don't prove to be all that strong.