The last big news we heard about BN.com was in the fall of 2003:

“In a surprise move, Barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN) has stopped selling eBooks. The online retailer is in the process of e-mailing its affiliates to let them know of the program’s demise this week.”

That was written by a blogger, Rick Aristotle Munarriz, who like so many e-pioneers was sent reeling by B&N’s pullout from a nascent e-book industry.

“With Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) as BN.com’s majority stakeholder,” Munarriz continued, “one has to wonder if the company is missing the high-margin potential of the medium or if the sales just aren’t there. Or, for the budding conspiracy theorists out there, is BN.com simply refusing to promote a niche where its parent company can’t partake or one that promotes a level playing field in an arena where publishing house suppliers are used to the advantages of size? eBook fans would like some answers. Unlike its warehouse-shipped forefathers, an immediate answer would be welcome.”

Well, maybe not immediately, exactly, but six years later Mr. Munarriz has his answer. BN.com is being resurrected, and this time we think it will be here to stay. Four months ago the world’s largest print-book chain acquired Fictionwise, the world’s largest e-book retailer in a $15.7 million deal we declared to be a game-changer. “With this single stroke,” we wrote, “B&N comes roaring back into a business it abandoned in 2003.

“Of far greater significance is that B&N is now catapulted back onto a competitive footing with amazon.com in the all-important e-book arena. Though Barnes & Noble doesn’t boast a Kindle or any other proprietary e-book reader, there is a host of devices now available or soon to come on stream capable of carrying the immense body of e-book content that Fictionwise has aggregated.”

Barnes & Noble is already billing itself as twice as big as Amazon (700,000 titles vs. 330,000). Of course, most of BN.com’s title list will consist of public domain books. Motoko Rich, reporting on the deal in the New York Times, points out that “More than 500,000 of the books now offered electronically on BN.com can be downloaded free, through an agreement with Google to provide electronic versions of public domain books that Google has scanned from university libraries… Currently, Google’s public domain books cannot be read on a Kindle.”

So most of BN.com’s books will be public domain – big deal! 700,000 books is the kind of scaled-up inventory that industry old-timers (circa 1998) said had to be achieved before the chain reaction became self-sustaining. And don’t forget that public domain is the very kind of inducement that Freemongers have been advocating to stimulate e-books over the tipping point. The interaction of all those downloadables with the 1.2 million hard copies offered by Barnes & Noble’s website is as tipping-pointy as you can get. (By the way, right now if you click on bn.com you get flipped to barnesandnoble.com, but in time BN.com will be a discrete e-book website.)

There are lots of issues to be worked out before launch such as pricing and compatibility with various devices. As to the latter, right now the company is trying to be device-agnostic but there’s lots of talk about it teaming up with the as-yet unnamed (will it EVER be named?) Plastic Logic reading device scheduled for release in 2010. Whether that gadget would become B&N’s Kindle, we don’t know, but we’re not sure why anyone would want to close out any e-readers, especially Sony and Apple. Publishers Lunch pundit Michael Cader says “BN said they have made ‘a strategic commerce and content partnership with Plastic Logic’ and ‘will power the eBookstore for the Plastic Logic eReader device.’” Cader adds that “In further explanations BN said they will be the exclusive vendor of ebooks for Plastic Logic.”

E-book aggregators are weaving garlands to strew on BN.com when it opens for business.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Publishers Lunch reports that Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio “is allocating $50 million of its $125 million capital budget this year to retail, IT, the Internet, digital initiatives and other items.” This comes on the heels of its recent acquisition of Fictionwise, the world’s leading deliverer of e-book content. Riggio said his customers are eager to expand their choices beyond “the four walls of our stores.”

RC

Back in December, after it moved a key executive into the position of Director of Digital Content, we speculated that Barnes & Noble might be contemplating a second assault on the ramparts of the e-book industry. Today the ramparts fell with the news that the retail giant has acquired Fictionwise, the world’s leading e-book retailer for $15.7 million.

With this single stroke, B&N comes roaring back into a business it abandoned in 2003. Of far greater significance is that B&N is now catapulted back onto a competitive footing with amazon.com in the all-important e-book arena. Though Barnes & Noble doesn’t boast a Kindle or any other proprietary e-book reader, there is a host of devices now available or soon to come on stream capable of carrying the immense body of e-book content that Fictionwise has aggregated.

Fictionwise’s multiformat feature enables subscribers to download books in such platforms as Adobe, Palm, Sony, iPhone and even Kindle itself. In January 2008, Fictionwise acquired eReader, the principal Palm-format etailer and reinforced the widely held view that it is the team to beat in the digital book major leagues.

Fictionwise was created in 2000 as a partnership between Steve Pendergrast and his brother Scott’s Mindwise Media, LLC. They subsequently spun Fictionwise off. Starting modestly with digital reprints of science fiction short stories, it was not long before its cutting edge e-book delivery system, brilliant metrics, and author- and fan-friendly business model attracted authors, publishers and other content providers. Today it sells thousands of e-book titles for nearly five hundred publishers including E-Reads. The Pendergasts will continue operating the website for the parent company.

Asked what he thought of the B&N/Fictionwise marriage, one executive pronounced it “Electrifying! It changes everything.”

Richard Curtis

Perhaps Apple boss Steven Jobs’ declaration that “People don’t read anymore” does not rank with Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace for our time” speech in 1938, just before Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. But it is not out of line to mention both in the same breath to exemplify how colossally wrong smart people can be.

Jobs made his scornful comment in response to a question about the Kindle. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” Aside from offending every literate person in the United States, including those who read one book or less every year, Jobs appalled everybody in the e-book business. They had looked to him to do for reading books what he had done for listening to music. By implying he was not entertaining a book-reading platform for the iPhone, he slapped the collective face of the e-book business. Thwarted by his hostility to an iPhone reader, customers turned to the Kindle to fill the e-book vacuum. Jobs could not have boosted the Kindle any more effectively if he had bought a controlling share of Amazon.com.

Fortunately, a number of determined and enterprising programmers took it upon themselves to spec – or hack – a reader application for the iPhone. And even more fortunately, Jobs did not discourage them. One hopes he realized he had spoken recklessly.

Which brings us to the Stanza, Lexcycle’s free e-book reader now in use on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Charlie Sorrel writes in Wired, “Stanza has been downloaded almost 600,000 times, and users are in turn downloading 50-60,000 books a day.” The key to this breakthrough is a partnership between Lexcycle and the online e-book seller Fictionwise.

Aside from the satisfaction of seeing Steve Jobs proven wrong, it’s also inspiring to see Fictionwise taking this initiative. We at E-Reads are big fans of Fictionwise. It is our principal e-book distributor and a major reason why this industry is beginning to thrive.

To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, “There will be e-books for our time.” No thanks to Steve Jobs.

RC

Along with today’s release of Apple’s 3G iPhone and the new iPhone application store, found in iTunes v. 7.7 and iPhone 2.0 software, Fictionwise has become the first major e-book retailer to offer free e-book software for Apple’s iPhone.

We all know Fictionwise as the world’s largest e-book retailer, and now they have their e-books ready for the world’s most famous touchscreen device. Before today, you had to hack your iPhone to run unsupported e-book software that was both risky and limited. Also, there were no stores that promoted the use of such software for your purchased e-books. But now Fictionwise is set to conquer the iPhone with their eReader software, which lets you carry your Fictionwise library everywhere you take your phone.

The best part is that it’s a free download through the iTunes application store. The next best thing is that all of E-Reads’ Multiformat e-books at Fictionwise are supported by the application!

There are other ebook options and more coming soon for the iPhone. In the future, Adobe and Mobipocket will be hitting the iPhone in a powerful way and hopefully that will bring even more digital e-book content to the world’s fingertips. Until then, Fictionwise is your best and safest bet for good reading on the iPhone.

- Michael