Barnes & Noble Adding to the eBook Story
The Amazon Kindle and its eBook store could be facing some stiff new competition. In addition to Sony’s eBook reader, Barnes & Noble says it’s going to join in selling electronic texts as well.
As a part of the plan, the retail bookstore has struck a deal with Plastic Logic which is set to launch its own Plastic Logic eReader gadget in early 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Barnes & Noble plans to offer more than 700,000 books, including 500,000 books in the public domain available from Google (Stock Quote: GOOG). Best sellers would be priced at about $10, in line with prices at the Kindle Store.
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The Barnes & Noble (Stock Quote: BKS) eBooks will be viewable on the Apple (Stock Quote: AAPL) iPhone and iPod Touch, BlackBerry (Stock Quote: RIMM) smart phones and most Microsoft (Stock Quote: MSFT) Windows and Mac computers. They will not be viewable on the Kindle or Sony (Stock Quote: SNE) reader.
Currently, Amazon’s (Stock Quote: AMZN) Kindle store has about 300,000 titles and Sony’s eBook reader store has about 200,000, plus free access to those 500,000 out-of-copyright books from Google, The Wall Street Journal says.
As far as the price of the readers, Sony’s starts at $280 and the Kindle starts at $299 after its price was lowered twice from $399 originally in 2007. The optimized Amazon Kindle DX for college textbooks costs $489.
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