The bid for your eReader dollar continues to get more and more competitive. The latest salvo was recently fired by Barnes & Noble, who emailed customers last week to inform them of a new promotion where the purchase of a Barnes & Noble Nook nets new owners a $50 B&N gift card that they can then turn around and use to start their eBook library. (It’s also available on their website.) At the typical Barnes & Noble price for a new best seller, it’s like getting four free books! The site does claim it’s a limited time offer, so if you’re in the market, don’t hesitate.

Since it’s a fair bet Nook owners were going to buy $50 in books at some point anyway, this is an effective $50 price cut. With Father’s Day right around the corner, it’s an aggressive move from the minds at the book mega-retailer, who are all quite familiar with the annual surge in “dad books” that are sold around the third week of June.

While I’m delighted to see some folks finally getting a price break, this deal only further deepens the question as to when we can expect a real round of price cuts from the major eReader manufacturers. With the much more feature-rich iPad starting at $499 and the market for early-adopters long since dried up, both B&N and Amazon need to start thinking about value and bargain positioning. Just last week, Amazon left us speculating whether the Kindle 3 would be a low-cost complement to the rumored Kindle Touch. A price drop on the existing stock certainly wouldn’t hurt either.

In fact, there are a number of things that both Barnes & Noble and Amazon could do to add value without even lowering the price:

• Include a case – It continues to baffle me why both companies pretend that something as basic as a case isn’t standard equipment for an expensive piece of consumer electronics. Instead, both opt to nickel and dime customers for another $30. These should be standard issue, with fancier versions available for those that want to spend extra.
• More free titles – There are literally millions of public domain titles out there, but neither company seems to do a lot to emphasize that fact, probably because it would hurt their bottom line to have people picking up free titles over paid ones. Would it really hurt to include more classics? (For the record, you can fairly easily get them on your own if you’re proactive enough.)
• More sharing – One of the great joys of book ownership is being able to easily and seamlessly share new works with friends and family. Amazon still lacks a lending option altogether and B&N’s is limited to one lend per book. Encouraging more sharing encourages community around their devices, and they’re not doing enough of that.

Rest assured, when there’s actually a proper price cut, we’ll be on top of it.