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B&N offers free WiFi in stores: E-book possibilities?
July 29, 2009 | 10:58 am
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By David Rothman
B&N’s new e-book store has been a real letdown so far, alas.
But here’s a nice wrinkle that B&N is already deploying—free WiFi in its brick-and-mortar stores.
So now shoppers can browse paper books and immediately order and receive e-book editions. What’s more, if they want to restrict their choices to paper books, they can up excerpts for reading in the store or at home.
Those possibilities occur to me, and it’ll be interesting to see if B&N fully uses WiFi to promote synergies between E and P, beyond just distributing e-coupons and other relationship-building tools.
I assume that in-store posters will steer wireless users to B&N’s own e-store, so that they won’t just shop for E generically.
It would also help for the B&N e-store site to play up the free WiFi in the p-stores. Hello, hello? I’ve seen no WiFi mention in the e-section of bn.com—just something on the home page without book-shopping mentioned. Or am I missing something? Those big Flash images make use of the e-store a real pain at times.
But let’s look ahead. Perhaps eventually we’ll even see in-store author signings of e-books—expedited by WiFi. Maybe even photos of fans posing with writers—zapped immediately to the customers’ e-mail accounts?
Other B&N news: Not clear if B&N will sell branded reader hardware
Meanwhlle check out Motoko Rich’s New York Times piece on B&N’s e-store and WiFi plans.
Of special interest: “Mr. Riggio declined to say whether the company would eventually sell its own branded device. He said the company was focusing on developing its e-reader software for as many devices as possible.”
Ideally that will mean not just the use of ePub but aggressive promotion of this approach—as well as nudges to publishers to drop DRM, one way to make B&N books more ownable than Amazon’s.
Images: GNU-licensed photo at top is from of B&N store in Los Angeles—by Admrboltz. The lower image is from B&N and shows the store at Seven Corners in Falls Church, Virginia.
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Comments:
I hope this means they’ll upgrade their WiFi. At my local B&N (which is one of the older stores), the WiFi is spotty at best and when it works, you have to be in the right spot at the right time. I always seem to have better luck hopping onto the Starbucks WiFi – which is a few doors down.
What would be really interesting is if the new Plastic Logic reader had some kind of camera/bar code scanner that could scan the bar codes of books in the bn store and immediately allow you to purchase the ebook of it on the device.
What would be really really interesting is if you could browse the periodicals section, purchase a new single copy of a magazine or newspaper on a reader device, and have the periodical delivered wirelessly, locally to your device — without the need to have a subscription to anything, including Internet service!
I can walk into B&N and buy the New York Times in print, but I can’t buy it in E-format over Wi-Fi even if B&N is Wi-Fi equipped and I own a Wi-Fi device.
If I want the latest NYT on my device, I have to subscribe to Times Reader for $3.45 a week. I did so, but only because the single-copy E-option is unavailable, at least not without some form of subscription.
And now it turns out that their Times Reader will not display properly on my popular Linux device despite the company’s claims — and the NYT customer service department hasn’t a clue. On my netbook it is impossible even to login to the Reader with a valid user ID due to poor design choices in the application.
Here’s hoping retailers, publishers and software developers make the most of local Wi-Fi sale and delivery. No Whispernet needed. Until then we must still exit the bookseller with an armload of inky print.