This week on the Gadget Lab podcast, the gang fools around with an e-reader, a new kind of netbook and an iPhone sleep aid. Yes, a sleep aid.

Product reviews editor Mike Calore kicks the show off with the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader, a lightweight device that our reviewer swooned over. The $140 price is on par with its competitor, the Amazon Kindle, and it’s teensier to boot. We’d recommend it to any bibliophile tired of toting paperbacks.

Staff writer Mike Isaac follows with his take on Google’s new web-only laptop, the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. The name stems from Google’s cloud-based approach to laptops for the future: Stripped down to the barest of necessities, the Chromebook doesn’t come with an optical drive, a huge hard drive or even an operating system like Mac OS X or Windows. Everything happens within the confines of the Chrome OS, Google’s name for a browser-based computing experience. It’s a revolutionary approach to mass-market laptops, but are we ready for it?

Next up, staff writer Brian X. Chen stops in with the Lark, a watchlike iPhone accessory that helps monitor your sleeping activity. It may be flawed, though; according to the Lark, Brian got six hours of “good sleep” despite waking up multiple times over the course of the night. Hmm.

Finally, Brian talks about the release of his new book, Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future, and Locked Us In. It’s essentially a meditation on how the advent of the smartphone changed the way we think, interact and live our daily lives. The book dropped last week, the same day as Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference event. It’s available through the usual retailer channels, and can also be found on the aforementioned Nook and Kindle in e-ink form.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast on iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our stylish eyewear, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds.

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #117