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By Paul Biba

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Update, 5:08 p.m., July 23: See a July 21 Ad Age piece on B&N’s chances against Amazon, which could benefit from such advantages as the “stickiness” of its store site. We’re reproducing an excerpt below our original item.

An excellent article at ZDNet by Larry Dignan chronicles B&N’s plans for e-books. This is "real" competition for the Kindle and B&N has the software and the ebooks to hit the ground running. The article doesn’t say whether the Plastic Logic unit will be wireless, but we know that Plastic Logic has promised this technology. In addition, in another blow to Amazon, the Plug Your Book blog is reporting that B&N will be offering a 6% affiliate commission. Amazon currently offers 0% on Kindle books.

Barnes & Noble has outlined its answer for Amazon’s Kindle: A partnership with Plastic Logic, which will launch an eReader in early 2010, and plans to open its e-book sales to multiple platforms.

In a statement Monday, Barnes & Noble said its e-book store will allow customers to buy books and read them on the iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry and Windows and Mac PCs. Barnes & Noble will also be the exclusive store provider of the Plastic Logic eReader. … “We were the first to enter the e-book market in 2001, but the demand wasn’t there,” said William J. Lynch Jr., president of Barnesandnoble.com, on a conference call.

Lynch also noted that Barnes & Noble will support the open EPub e-book standard, which is “good for the consumer.” …

* The Barnes & Noble e-book store will have access to 700,000 titles for $9.99;
* Public domain books from Google will be available (and are included in the 700,000 title tally); [Half a million of the 700,000 titles are freebies from Google, according to PC World.]
* Lynch said that the Barnes & Noble e-book store will top 1 million titles shortly;
* Barnes & Noble’s eReader application is device agnostic.

Excerpt (inserted July 23)

Rita Chang at Advertising Age has just done a nice overview article on the competitive arena that B&N is operating in. I haven’t seen an article take that tack before. Here are three short quotes, one from our own David Rothman:

"The question is: Why didn’t they just come out with their own reader? Why have they chosen a partner that doesn’t have a product that exists yet?" Ms. Rotman Epps [a Forrester analyst] asked.

Ms. Rotman Epps said she had not heard from Plastic Logic "a convincing strategy for marketing and distributing their product. They may still be formulating a strategy, or they may just be unwilling to discuss it."

Right now, Barnes & Noble has no plans to leverage one of its greatest assets: It does not intend to integrate its popular loyalty program with its e-book service, at least not initially, Ms. Rotman Epps said.

"That’s a huge missed opportunity for Barnes & Noble to tap into its most engaged customer base," she said. …

"It’s going to be a very big challenge for Barnes & Noble," said David Rothman, editor and publisher of the e-book blog TeleRead.org, adding that Amazon has a lot of stickiness on its side.

"People simply like the huge bank of book reviews from customers built up over the years, [and they] like to use Amazon to keep records of purchases," he said. "Barnes & Noble has customer comments on books and is otherwise trying to build up its community site. But it has a long way to go. It has not integrated the community aspects into its book pages as extensively as Amazon has." …

"It has to out-distribute Amazon, and out-partner these guys in the field, whether it’s [mobile] platform vendors like Android or wireless operators," said John Jackson, VP-research at CCS Insight. "It’s about picking the ones that give you the quickest path to scale."

 
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