Barnes & Noble to Test Bundling e-Books, p-Books, reports Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.
“Barnes & Noble will begin testing the sale of bundled print books and e-books in the next 60 to 90 days.”

That means that if you buy a print edition at a B&N store you’ll be able to add the e-book at a discount. “Providing e-books and print book bundles is just one way B&N hopes to use its retail footprint to increase sales of e-books while maintaining its lead position as the nation’s largest bookseller,” says B&N.Com president William Lynch.

Bundling has long been a dream of digital technologists hoping to satisfy the needs both of print and e-book readers and offers a rare exception to the proverb that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. B&N’s plan may kick off yet another round of pricing debate when pundits and consumers question whether the e-book shouldn’t simply be thrown into the bag free with purchase of the printed book. In any event, bundling gives B&N an advantage over some retailers that are not in a position to sell a print book and an e-book in a single transaction.  Amazon’s response to B&N’s gambit will be interesting to see.

Lynch also discussed adding print on demand to B&N’s roster of core services, and hinted that it might even buy into a POD company. More likely, for the near future, B&N might experiment with installing Espresso POD machines on the premises of certain stores.

Pictured here is a bundling bed. According to Wikipedia, “bundling, or tarrying, was the traditional practice of wrapping one person in a bed accompanied by another, usually as a part of courting behavior. The tradition is thought to have originated either in the Netherlands or in the British Isles and later became common in Colonial America, especially in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. When used for courtship, the aim was to allow intimacy without sexual intercourse.”

Sounds like the perfect metaphor for joining book and Nook.

Richard Curtis