While the Nook — Barnes & Noble’s $259 e-reader and Kindle rival — has been available for purchase online since November, it has yet to be sold in the company’s brick-and-mortar stores. Come Wednesday, however, that will all change.

The New York Times is reporting, “Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest bookselling chain, said that its Nook electronic reading device would be available for purchase in its stores starting Wednesday.”

Barnes & Noble originally made a big splash with its Nook announcement in late October, but its digital book reader has since been met with mixed reviews and suffered from stock shortage problems around the holidays.

The push to finally get the Nook in Barnes & Noble stores is likely the result of the hoopla involving Apple’s iPad. As Google is learning via lackluster Nexus One sales, consumers haven’t exactly embraced the online-only purchase model when it comes to electronics. With its physical debut coming several months prior to the iPad’s, Barnes & Noble might have an opportunity to land key sales before consumers can hold the iPad for themselves.

Facebook has just started rolling out a new photo uploader, one that the company promises will be faster, easier and more stable than the current one.

In an announcement on Facebook’s blog, the company revealed that the new Facebook uploader is actually a browser plug-in. In order to upload photos, you have to install it.

Once that’s done, though, you will be greeted by a new interface for uploading photos that connects to your computer’s file directory. From Facebook, you can navigate your hard drive and pick out the photos you want. A preview function on the bottom of the uploader makes it simple to pick the right pics out.

Oh, and it has another nifty feature: background uploads. You can navigate away from not only the upload page, but from Facebook itself while uploading photos. A notification will tell you that the uploads are done.

We don’t like installing plug-ins unless we have to, but we can see why Facebook took this approach. Still, this will limit some people from being able to upload, especially those at work with locked-down browsers.

What do you think: Is this a smart move by Facebook or are plug-ins a bad idea? Is it active for you? Let us know in the comments.