Barnes & Noble to release Amazon Kindle competitor
The Barnes & Noble e-bookstore has been available for a number of portable devices for some time. Now, it is believed that the bookstore chain will soon unveil a hardware competitor to the Kindle.
Manufacturers of the iPhone, BlackBerry and coming e-readers from Plastic Logic and Irex, for whom Barnes & Noble has made available software to access their e-bookstore, may soon be giving their own customer’s devices some competition. B & N is expected to release its own e-book reader hardware this coming Thursday at an event at Chelsea Piers in New York City. The event is being billed as “a major event in our company’s history.”
There have been persistent rumors for several months that Barnes & Noble was planning Kindle competitor with an Asian partner. It appears as if that relationship has borne fruit and that B & N is ready to jump into the e-book reader fray against what is already solid competition with a substantial head start. That head start is enjoyed, of course, by the Kindle reader from Amazon, but the iPhone and other similar smartphones could also be considered to have a significant lead the marketplace.
Barnes & Noble also has a different attitude than Amazon about usage rights of the e-books that they sell, whether for their own device or not, according to a New York times story. They believe in adding the right to lend books to friends, just as non-virtual books can be loaned. Barnes & Noble is negotiating with a number of publishers about this sort of “e-lending” and have not yet been completely successful. So far, B & N and publishers have been unable to make a deal on how many times per year an e-book can be “loaned.”
Barnes & Noble would also like to allow e-book readers to walk into their brick and mortar stores and browse digital books over the store WiFi networks. An executive of one of the publishers with whom Barnes & Noble is negotiation says, “Fourteen million people walk into those stores every day, and Barnes & Noble feels pretty strongly that they have a beautiful chance to convert a whole bunch of regular readers to e-books by selling them a wider array of devices, and the chance to go into a store and browse digital.”
In all likelihood, the closer the user rights of an e-book come to those of a regular book, the more likely readers are to adopt them. The ability to browse e-books before the sale, and the right to lend them after they have been purchased, should go a long way toward making e-books as popular as paper books. Many people don’t like the idea of the e-book at all, but others may be swayed to switch if they could legally use an e-book just as they can use a paper book.
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October 12th, 2009
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