Book retailing titan Barnes & Noble has been building its electronic book sales effort this year with some haste, likely hoping to slow the growing momentum of Amazon’s Kindle before it becomes unstoppable. In March, Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise, maker of a popular ebook reader app for the iPhone and proprietor of several popular ebook stores online including eReader.com. Then, earlier this month, B&N slashed prices at the newly acquired ebook vendor. Now comes word in the Wall Street Journal that B&N has opened its own branded major online ebook store:
This is a fantastic development for people like me who like to read ebooks. I’m a big fan of my Kindle, as you may have heard. But I’ve also been alarmed by some of Amazon’s ham-handed moves in the ebook space, like the recent decision to reach onto customers’ devices and delete a validly purchased book (even if the book was posted improperly in the Kindle store). And I’ve expressed my concerns about ebook prices creeping higher in the Kindle store.
All this has gone on under the nose of Sony, which seems to present little real competition. It still has no wireless mobile play and prices in its ebook store are rarely competitive.
A strong move into the market by Barnes & Noble should force Amazon to do more to wow and delight its customers. And it may hasten the day when book publishers wake up and realize just how damaging it’s been for them to lock down all ebooks with cumbersome Digital Rights Management (or DRM) software.
I do think that the Barnes & Nobles ebook store starts out with a few important weaknesses. The company has no hardware reader and apparently won’t have one compatible with its format until the Plastic Logic ereader hits the market hopefully in early 2010. So for starters, its ebooks can be read only on mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry plus Mac and Windows computers. While there’s an argument to be made over whether dedicated ebook readers and their high-contrast, low-eyestrain screens will remain popular (as I think they will), there’s little doubt that people who own one are hardcore, frequent ebook buyers. Not reaching that group of shoppers will hurt.
Finally, initial selection and pricing may lag well behind Amazon’s Kindle store. Barnes & Noble says it will have 700,000 ebooks for sale but that includes 500,000 public domain books from Google and only 200,000 recent editions. And while it will copy Amazon’s $9.99 price point, that will only cover “hundreds of new release and bestsellers” — a far cry from the thousands of ebooks priced under $10 at Amazon.
As a sidenote, the chatter among publishing industry types about ebook pricing continues to grow more frantic. I recently found myself asking skeptical questions in the comments of posts by publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin’s ruminations and Evan Schnittman, who works for Oxford University Press. I wonder what impact Barnes & Noble’s $9.99 pricing will have on the industry’s views?
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