Amazon may finally get challenged in the online book selling business, with the largest brick-and-mortar book retailer in the US, Barnes & Noble, launching a digital book store called eBookstore. The e-books will be mostly platform agnostic and available for Windows, Mac OS, iPhone, iTouch and Blackberry smartphones.
“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 William J. Lynch, president of BN.com. “As America’s #1 bookstore and newsstand, our goal at Barnes & Noble is to build a service that revolves around the customer, enabling them to have access to hundreds of thousands of titles and read on their smartphone, PC, and many other existing and future devices. We want to make eBooks simple, accessible, affordable and convenient for everyone.”
The new eBookstore will be the largest in the world, according to the company, boasting over 700,000 titles and expecting more than 1 million by next year. The e-books will sell for the now standard $9.99 but the store will also offer more than half a million public domain books for free.
The company is also announcing a new version of its eReader software, which it got as part of the Fictionwise acquisition this year, allowing users to connect to the new digital store with a number of devices through a wired or wireless connection. The software is available on both Windows and Mac computers but also on mobile devices enabling users to have their e-books available everywhere.
But one of the biggest announcements was a new ebook reader device to compete with Amazon's Kindle and to a smaller degree with Sony's reader. The new device will be built by Plastic Logic and should be coming sometime next year with pricing not announced but expected to be lower than Kindle's.
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