Barnes & Noble Inc.

Barnes & Noble Inc. is a publicly traded company to offer online customers the Web’s first destination for books, DVD, music, video games and other services. The Barnes & Noble.com has created a vast numbers of stores that include also Audiobooks and the Bargain Area. Recently the company has declared that e-books will be counted among the priorities to be set in the company’s future strategy. On Monday the Barnes’ digital strategy was revealed, a strategy that included two main announcements regarding Barnes&Noble eBookstore and the plans reserved for the e-book readers together with the partnership they have with Plastic Logic for producing e-book device.

Monday the eBookstore was launched offering 700,000 titles considering the Barnes & Noble’s press releases, but later in a conference they declared that the eBookstore includes actually 500,000 free titles accessible to the public providing new releases and bestsellers at $9.99, the same as Amazon’s Kindle store. It is expected that the selection they have at present to increase up to one million or even more in the next year, selection that incorporates e-books from established publishers, Google and independent direct-to-e-books publishers.

William J. Lynch, President of BN.com, while being asked about how soon Barnes & Noble figured to increase its proportion of the eBookstore (without Google offerings), said that the company is planning and dedicated to offer the B & N consumers every title that is available in digital format. In this regard, B & N e-Bookstore will operate only for EPub, which is the standard from the International digital Publishing Forum for free and open e-book. The books will have a copyright protection and will be accessible for downloading as well as capable of digitally storing in Your Library.

Lynch declared that the downloading can be performed to multiple devices, since Barnes & Noble provides the latest eReader software for a number of device platforms, such as cell phones (iPhone, Blackberry), PC and Mac computers, and as it has been lately announced the eBookstore will be available for all platforms through the eReader software that was acquired from Fictionwise. In case your hard drive fails, or you lose your mobile phone, B & N enables you to digitally access your books, so long as you are on their records as a purchaser, you are allowed to download it whenever and how often you need to.

The digital book reader – eReader - that belongs to Plastic Logic (the partners of B & N) is supposed to be released on the market in early 2010 and Barnes & Noble eBookstore is set to have exclusiveness for this eReader, according to Lunch who revealed no further details regarding other levels of partnership. The eReader provided by Plastic Logic will be 8.5” by 11”, having a wireless connection, displaying a more comfortable size of a sheet of paper, becoming in this way a real threat to Amazon’s Kindle DX.