Barnes & Noble Debuts eBookstore With 700K Titles

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on July 21, 2009 - 9:12am.

New York - Bookseller Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) has announced the launch of what it says is the world's largest eBookstore, which initially will offer more than 700,000 titles in a range of e-book formats. The company also announced an exclusive deal to sell a forthcoming e-book reader hardware device made by Plastic Logic, taking a page from rival Amazon (NASD: AMZN) with its Kindle reader.

The Barnes & Noble eBookstore will use a software reader application acquired from Fictionwise in March, which supports platforms including Windows, Mac, BlackBerry and iPhone.

Some 500,000 of the e-book titles are being made available for free download through a deal with Google, which is providing books already in the public domain.

The company said it expects to count well over one million titles within the next year; Amazon currently offers about 330,000 e-book titles.

Bestseller and new release titles at Barnes & Noble's eBookstores will sell for $9.99, matching Amazon.com's blanket price for all the e-books it sells, although the company's president told The New York Times that "pricing policies won't remain static."

"We're working with our publishers on various pricing models. As the pricing model evolves over time, we will adjust," Barnes & Noble.com president William J. Lynch told The Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/technology/internet/21book.html

http://snipurl.com/no5az (Ars Technica)

http://www.bn.com/ebooks