Despite its platform ranking in third place behind Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad in the e-book reader stakes, nevertheless Barnes & Noble has high hopes for its new NOOKcolor device.

Running Android 2.1, and based on the Android SDK, the company is supporting its hardware with the NOOK SDK 1.0, an Android SDK add-on.

"We are very excited about the launch of NOOKdeveloper and the release of the first development SDK for NOOKcolor," said Ted Patrick, Barnes & Noble's chief evangelist for developer relations.

"More than anything, we would like to welcome you to our program and we look forward to helping get your application onto NOOKcolor,"

Hook the Nook

Released in mid November in the US, NOOKcolor is a $249, wi-fi-enabled e-reader with a 7-inch (1024 x 600 resolution) touchscreen and running an 800 MHz ARM Cortex A8 chip.

You can find out more from the developer site here, or order it here (US only).

[source: NOOKdeveloper]