Barnes & Noble to Amazon: Mine Is Bigger Than Yours
by John Paczkowski
Posted on July 21, 2009 at 2:00 AM PT
Six years after shuttering its first e-book effort, Barnes & Noble has embarked on a new one. Monday afternoon, the bookseller announced what it describes as “the world’s largest eBookstore,” an online storefront that boasts 700,000 titles.
That’s substantially more than the 300,000 available for download on Amazon’s Kindle service, though half-a-million of them are public-domain books provided by Google (GOOG). They’ll be compatible with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry smartphones, and, when it finally arrives at market, the Plastic Logic eReader, a Kindle DX-size e-book reader for which the Barnes & Noble eBookstore will be the exclusive storefront.
“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time,” said BN.com president William J. Lynch.
With a few noteworthy exceptions, of course. E-books sold by Barnes & Noble (BKS) won’t be compatible with Sony’s (SNE) Sony Reader Digital Book or Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, which they are clearly intended to undermine.
To what degree they’ll manage that is anyone’s guess. One thing is sure: We’ll almost certainly be seeing an e-book price war in the near future. And when Apple finally gets around to uncrating that tablet/e-reader device it’s been working on, all bets are off.
Below, video of the Plastic Logic Reader demo from our D7 conference in late May.
Comments
In the end all ebooks will be compatible. Anybody remembers early PCs?
Posted by David Robins at July 21st, 2009 at 2:21 amIn a virtual internet price war, the bigger company wins and that’s Amazon. Apple users don’t read books except when it’s assigned by their teachers.
Posted by Jeff Stevens at July 21st, 2009 at 4:37 amJohn, it’s all about reading glasses and the bathroom. The winning ebook technology is the one that works best for those. Perhaps your still too young to get it.
I dunno, Jeff. I just started reading a tenth novel on Kindle for iPhone and I’ve been out of school for years now.
Posted by John Paczkowski at July 21st, 2009 at 7:20 amI think people will be disappointed with the quality of the books digitized by Google. In their race to flood their search engine with content, they gave up quality for quantity. A book isn’t much good to me if it is missing pages.
I download most of my books from kirtasbooks.com, they have over 300K titles, at $1.95 each.
Posted by Todd Whiting at July 21st, 2009 at 8:00 amDo you really think Apple will want to join in on the battle AFTER the price war erupts? They’ve never been known to undercut anyone on price (for hardware at least, OS X is clearly both better than and cheaper than Windows).
I can see them doing a tablet PC, for those of us not interested in doing everything on a tiny device. But book reading will be a small pert of that as it is for the iPhone. Such a device will do far more than the Kindle or the B&N devices I suspect.
Seems like everyone is throwing their junk cards out there first while waiting to see what everyone else will do. That’s why I’m not interested in loading up my Kindle with content that will be useless when I switch to something else. You listening Amazon?
Apple is the only company really building brand loyalty these days, and I suspect at some point we will realize that it was a lot more fragile than it seems to be now.
Posted by Mac Beach at July 21st, 2009 at 9:56 amTo me the following quote from BN.com’s president William Lynch (that you quote in the article as well) hits the point for the long term:
“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time”
But they could have made the point more strongly by making their content compatible with the Kindle and Sony’s Reader right from the start. In time, it is likely that the device a user chooses won’t be nearly so important.
Posted by mike ellison at July 23rd, 2009 at 9:49 am