Barnes and Noble eReader app updated

I've been watching the e-reader competition with great interest lately -- after the iPad entered the market with such a splash, Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been trying to position their own devices in a place where they'll at least be profitable. But at the same time, those apparent iPad competitors have also been updating their own App Store apps. Amazon updated the Kindle app a little while back, and now Barnes and Noble has updated its own iPad app, including support for multiple orientations and brightness control, along with a few other bugfixes and features.

As I said before, I like the precedent here -- even if these companies don't match up with Apple on the hardware, this update does a lot to bring the B&N eReader in line with iBooks. Of course this gives us iPad users more options -- even if we don't own a Kindle or a Nook, we've still got the chance to use those services.

I would like to see a little more progress made with compatibility -- it's annoying to buy a book on one platform and not be able to read it on any other. But I guess that's the trade-off for having options -- Amazon and B&N will only keep up their app development while the money is coming in from their respective bookstores.