Yesterday Barnes & Noble announced “the world’s largest eBookstore”: more than 700,000 titles (including many new ones at $9.99), available from the B&N Website. They also introduced a free eReader you can download for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Mac and Windows desktops and laptops. And while they were at it, they also announced that they “will power the eBookstore for the Plastic Logic eReader device”, which should launch early next year.

I installed the PC version of the eReader this morning and took it for a test drive. It allowed me to download a half-dozen free titles such as Dracula, Little Women, and Pride and Prejudice. (That’s nice, but unlike a certain Reference Librarian here at Jenkins, I’m just not that into Jane Austen.) Anyway, the eReader works pretty well, but it’s not the same as reading the printed word. I doubt that the eReader alone would make me switch to ebooks. And I haven’t used a Kindle at all — the price, though dropping, is still a barrier for me. But I’m keeping an open mind, for now.

This article about the B&N launch from the NY Times makes an interesting point: $9.99 “has become the de facto e-book price since Amazon.com set it for Kindle sales.” That price annoys publishers the way that Apple’s $.99 price for songs from iTunes gave music labels agita. In another article, the Times discusses how publishers sometimes delay ebook releases so as not to negatively impact juicy hardcover sales:

“At least one publisher has made a decision to withhold an e-book edition of a forthcoming book to preserve demand for a hardcover edition. Sourcebooks, an independent publisher, is releasing Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse, a novel aimed at children, in September in hardcover. It will hold back the e-book until six months later. Dominique Raccah, chief executive of Sourcebooks, said she wanted to prevent the cannibalization of hardcover sales. ‘If you as a consumer can look at a book and say: “I have two products; one is $27.95, and the other is $9.95. Which should I buy?”‘ Ms. Raccah said, ‘that’s not a difficult decision.’ Ms. Raccah said that because retailers like Amazon have set the standard consumer price for e-books, the publisher could only control when a book would be released in other formats. Delaying the release of an e-book, she said, was like publishing a cheaper paperback edition months after a hardcover edition.”

Finally, there’s no word on B&N’s policy for remotely nuking your ebook collection should a publisher give the order.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on July 21, 2009 - 10:30 am

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