(2009-07-22) Bn Ebook Store

Barnes And Noble has launched an EBook store.

The new e-bookstore is said to have over 700,000 titles... 500,000 are said to be in the Public Domain and downloadable for free. Barnes And Noble previously tried to run an e-book store from 2001-2006, however sales were apparently too low so they decided to close the store.

B&N has gotten to its figure by partnering with Google, gaining access to out-of-copyright works that have been scanned as part of the Google Book Search service... Amazon's iron fist was obvious from the fact that everything we looked for was at the $9.99 price point. B&N's price for the same works was consistently higher, in one case more than double.

They announced a partnership with Plastic Logic, which is developing an e-book device that would compete with the Kindle. It is expected to be the size of a sheet of notebook paper and would have wireless download capabilities similar to the Kindle and be on the market in early 2010.

Until that point, however, B&N can compete based on the number of platforms it supports, as it's offering downloads for Windows and Mac OS, as well as Blackberry and IPhone-s. We took a quick look at the Mac and iPhone software. In what is undoubtedly a legacy of the acquisitions that power the B&N service, books come in a DRM-ed form of the Palm Doc (.pdb) file format. Protected works can be unlocked using the purchaser's credit card information. They also have a desktop app that came from Fiction Wise.