Nook Tablets And Nook Color Get Graphic Novels From DC, New Zoom View Feature

Owners of the Nook Tablet and Nook Color (plus Android tablets with the Nook app) will now be able to catch up on the adventures of Superman, Batman, Sandman, and other characters published by DC Entertainment. Barnes & Noble announced today that more than 100 of DC’s graphic novels are available through Nook Comics.

To facilitate the reading experience, Barnes & Noble also says it’s adding a new feature called Zoom View, allowing readers to zoom in on a particular panel, then read the graphic novel panel-by-panel. This will probably sound familiar to users of ComiXology and affiliated apps on the iPad, where the Guided View experience has gone a long way towards making comics pages readable on smaller screens.

Marvel and Barnes & Noble made a similar partnership announcement for Nook Tablets last fall. Collectively, these announcements suggest that the Nook is making steps to catch up with other devices (the Kindle being the bigger competitor, but the iPad being the trendsetter when it comes to digital comics) as a comics reading experience.

In the case of DC, the news also means that the publisher has gotten over its dispute with Barnes & Noble from last fall. DC had announced that it was offering 100 graphic novels exclusively on the Kindle Fire, prompting Barnes & Noble to pull those titles from the shelves of its physical stores, claiming, “we will not stock physical books in our stores if we are not offered the available digital format.” Well, now they’re being offered the digital format.

Those 100 Nook titles will include a number of graphic novels collecting the first storylines from The New 52, the initiative that DC launched last fall to reboot all of its characters (and also to take a more aggressive approach to digital distribution). Other titles include Watchmen, All Star Superman Vol. 1 and 2, and The Sandman Vol. 1-10.