Anyone got any brainstorms for naming BN.Com’s proprietary e-book reader? We dubbed Plastic Logic’s no-namer the Teasle but we’re all out of ideas for the device that will be unveiled at what the press release calls “A Major Event in Our Company’s History”. It will take place at 4:15 PM on Tuesday October 20th at Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers on Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront.

Maybe call it USS United States to honor the great superliner launched a few docks south of Pier 60 back in 1952. Just don’t call it the Normandie, which burned and capsized at a 49th Street pier in 1942.

According to fairly well-informed speculation, BN’s wireless device will have a 6-inch touch screen and a virtual keyboard, and will be powered by Android. There is also a rumor that the device will enable downloaders to lend friends their e-books the way they lend them their book-books.

There are some mysteries revolving around the October 20 shindig. First and foremost is that Barnes & Noble completely denies that it’s launching its own e-reader. “We have made no announcement of an e-book reader device,” CNET’s Steven Musil quoted a senior public affairs officer. The spokeswoman pointed out that B&N is “already supporting a variety of e-book reader devices.”

Which leads to confusion #2. Ever since announcing its re-entry into e-books last summer BN.com has been making passes at several manufacturers, and even announced an exclusive alliance with the Plastic Logic. When that happened we wrote, “We’re not sure why anyone would want to close out any e-readers, especially Sony and Apple.” It now appears that the handshake with Plastic Logic was not so much an alliance as a dalliance.

One of the most interesting sources of speculation about the BN.com device revolves around that lending feature. Motoko Rich and Brad Stone of the New York Times report that “B.&N. has been talking to publishers about a new model, whereby users are granted a license to ‘lend’ an e-book to a friend. This could help the bookseller market the device to members of its book clubs program.”

Lending e-books is a great concept but it will have to be sold to publishers, who make no money on borrowed e-books. There is a way to lend e-books via libraries, but the process is tightly controlled and the number of lenders restricted. You can read more about e-book libraries here.

E-Reads will be Pier Sixty on October 20th, cocktail in one hand and cell phone in the other, and we’ll get our report to you as soon as the announcement is made. We think it’s about a new e-book device, but given B&N’s denials it could simply be that the company is hoping to tell us it expects to have a nice holiday season. That would indeed be “major event in our company’s history”, since last year around the same time B&N Chairman Len Riggio announced that the 2008 holiday was shaping up to be the worst he had seen in thirty years.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.