After months of secrecy and speculation, Apple has finally officially announced its latest gadget – the iPad tablet. Steve Jobs himself unveiled the 10” touch screen device today at an invitation-only event in San Francisco. The iPad is expected to be a player in the e-book market which is currently dominated by Amazon’s Kindle. At the same time, it will serve as a larger version of the iPod Touch and be able to run the hundreds of thousands of apps in the iTunes App Store. Amazon seems to have anticipated this by putting out a call for developers to create applications for the Kindle.

The iPad also has a built-in iPod and can play iTunes music and video content. At $499, it might just give the Kindle a run for its money. You can see Jobs and the iPad in this YouTube video of today’s presentation. For a different take on the subject, see this blog post from The Onion.

A new e-book reader called the Nook had its debut last week, and it may just give Amazon’s Kindle, the leading e-reader, a run for its money. The Nook is from Barnes & Noble. Some of its unique features include a full-color strip of book covers at the bottom of the display that allows you to pick a book to read.

The Nook also supports sharing e-books with friends, which Wired magazine says may be the feature that makes the device go viral.

The Nook will be sold in Barnes & Noble stores as well as online, meaning customers can use B&N’s free in-store Wi-Fi to demo the look and feel of the product before buying. On sale at the end of November, the Nook is available now for pre-order at $259 (which is very close in price to the Kindle-2).

Readers who want to access electronic books currently are limited in their choice of electronic reading devices. There’s the Kindle from Amazon, which retails for around $360, and Sony’s Reader, which sells for $270 to $350. Now there’s a new option. The Cool-ER from Interead.com was introduced a few months ago for $249. It’s currently available on the Coolreaders website. The Cool-ER uses the E-Ink display and has the same screen size as the other readers, but is lighter and more compact. There are fewer features, such as no wireless Internet adapter and no Bluetooth connection or keyboard, but it’s still nice to have another option available when it comes to readers.