B&N to provides online store for Plastic Logic, supports EPUB; offers 6% affiliate comm.—but faces major challenges
By Paul Biba
Update, 5:08 p.m., July 23: See a July 21 Ad Age piece on B&N’s chances against Amazon, which could benefit from such advantages as the “stickiness” of its store site. We’re reproducing an excerpt below our original item.
An excellent article at ZDNet by Larry Dignan chronicles B&N’s plans for e-books. This is "real" competition for the Kindle and B&N has the software and the ebooks to hit the ground running. The article doesn’t say whether the Plastic Logic unit will be wireless, but we know that Plastic Logic has promised this technology. In addition, in another blow to Amazon, the Plug Your Book blog is reporting that B&N will be offering a 6% affiliate commission. Amazon currently offers 0% on Kindle books.
Barnes & Noble has outlined its answer for Amazon’s Kindle: A partnership with Plastic Logic, which will launch an eReader in early 2010, and plans to open its e-book sales to multiple platforms.
In a statement Monday, Barnes & Noble said its e-book store will allow customers to buy books and read them on the iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry and Windows and Mac PCs. Barnes & Noble will also be the exclusive store provider of the Plastic Logic eReader. … “We were the first to enter the e-book market in 2001, but the demand wasn’t there,” said William J. Lynch Jr., president of Barnesandnoble.com, on a conference call.
Lynch also noted that Barnes & Noble will support the open EPub e-book standard, which is “good for the consumer.” …
* The Barnes & Noble e-book store will have access to 700,000 titles for $9.99;
* Public domain books from Google will be available (and are included in the 700,000 title tally); [Half a million of the 700,000 titles are freebies from Google, according to PC World.]
* Lynch said that the Barnes & Noble e-book store will top 1 million titles shortly;
* Barnes & Noble’s eReader application is device agnostic.
Excerpt (inserted July 23)
Rita Chang at Advertising Age has just done a nice overview article on the competitive arena that B&N is operating in. I haven’t seen an article take that tack before. Here are three short quotes, one from our own David Rothman:
"The question is: Why didn’t they just come out with their own reader? Why have they chosen a partner that doesn’t have a product that exists yet?" Ms. Rotman Epps [a Forrester analyst] asked.
Ms. Rotman Epps said she had not heard from Plastic Logic "a convincing strategy for marketing and distributing their product. They may still be formulating a strategy, or they may just be unwilling to discuss it."
Right now, Barnes & Noble has no plans to leverage one of its greatest assets: It does not intend to integrate its popular loyalty program with its e-book service, at least not initially, Ms. Rotman Epps said.
"That’s a huge missed opportunity for Barnes & Noble to tap into its most engaged customer base," she said. …
"It’s going to be a very big challenge for Barnes & Noble," said David Rothman, editor and publisher of the e-book blog TeleRead.org, adding that Amazon has a lot of stickiness on its side.
"People simply like the huge bank of book reviews from customers built up over the years, [and they] like to use Amazon to keep records of purchases," he said. "Barnes & Noble has customer comments on books and is otherwise trying to build up its community site. But it has a long way to go. It has not integrated the community aspects into its book pages as extensively as Amazon has." …
"It has to out-distribute Amazon, and out-partner these guys in the field, whether it’s [mobile] platform vendors like Android or wireless operators," said John Jackson, VP-research at CCS Insight. "It’s about picking the ones that give you the quickest path to scale."
July 20th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
With the exception of the B&N store, this appears to be old news. FictionWise was already signed up as the ebook store provider for Plastic Logic (which has not formally indicated support for the eReader format), and “will” provide ePub is once again an announcement of intent to migrate eReader to ePub (with its own DRM, not Adobe ADEPT) at some time in the future. The B&N store currently only provides eReader ebooks.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Until B&N provides epub ebooks that can be read on other devices (preferably w/o DRM), I rate this as a fail. We don’t need another proprietary format with proprietary DRM. We need standards and interoperability, not lock-in.
And yes, Alan is correct, this isn’t anything new, except that B&N is now integrating Fictionwise ebooks into their own site.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
This is hardly a blow to Amazon. Amazon will respond. Consumers will likely benefit.
Let the games begin!
July 20th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
They intend to charge $9.99 for the Google PD books?
Really? Hmm…
July 20th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
This is great news for consumers. Amazon is far from perfect as their recent missteps indicate. As a huge Kindle fan, I’m psyched that this may create some genuine competitive pressure on Amazon to keep ebook prices low, add more features and cut back on crazy DRM nonsense. Maybe this hastens the day when publishers stop insisting on DRM, as happened in the music market? I also hope this will prompt publishers to think smarter about their pricing strategies and recent complaints about the $9.99 price point.
Still, there is a lot of vapor and hype in the B&N announcement. We have no date of availability, no pricing and no set feature list for the Plastic Logic Reader. By the time it finally arrives, Kindle may be several more steps ahead. And pricing in the B&N online store may be a concern — only “hundreds” of ebooks will be priced at $9.99. Will it be so limited as to advance the cause of higher ebook prices? I sure hope not.
I’ve blogged some more thoughts at http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/?p=1033
July 20th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Just to clarify one glaring error in Dignan’s piece, B&N did NOT say all books would be $9.99. They said only a small few:
“Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore offering its customers seamless access to more than 700,000 titles, including hundreds of new releases and bestsellers at only $9.99, making it the world’s largest selection of eBooks available in one place.”
See press release at http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com/press_releases/2009_july_20_ebookstore.html
July 20th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
http://gizmodo.com/5318896/barnes-and-noble-announces-worlds-largest-ebookstore-upcoming-ereader
Okay, now that’s more like it.
Seems Dignan needs to do some editing.
1- B&N will offer up to *hundreds* of Best-sellers at $9.99.(Wow!) Not everything. (Yeah, right!)
2- Half a million of the 700,000 are Google’s books so while they probably intend to charge for them, they probably *won’t* be silly enough to think they’ll get $10 for PD books. (They’d better not.)
Competition is good: maybe B&N will actually do something competitive between now and next year. But hundreds (wow!) of bestsellers at $9.99 won’t hack it. A licensed reader next year (wow!) won’t hack it. And another flavor of ePub DRM? (Actually, that one I favor; the chaos that might ensue should actually help kill DRM.)
Lots of sound and fury here but very little substance; sounds more like a statement of intent than anything that will impact the market any time soon.
But it does seem like the publishers have found a spear-carrier for their crusade for higher prices…
July 20th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Until the day B&N actually can offer an ereader device, the iPhone screen too small to really count, this is a lot of smoke and mirrors, but maybe there will be enough fire behind the scene to start a real ebook retail war. In the end maybe it will be like PC or Mac people: will you be an Amazon or B&N?
July 20th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
“We were the first to enter the e-book market in 2001, but the demand wasn’t there,” said William J. Lynch Jr., president of Barnesandnoble.com, on a conference call.
Lynch is claiming Barnes and Noble was first? Didn’t Peanut Press have them beat by a considerable margin?
July 21st, 2009 at 12:24 am
I’m done buying ebooks altogether until:
1) DRM is either standardized or done away with entirely.
2) I retain standard rights of re-sale to ebooks I buy.
3) Publishers start making an effort to make ebooks nicely formatted and pleasant to look at. I’m sick of crappy formatted books that look like they were shoved through a scanner as quickly as possible and never proof read.
This probably means I won’t be buying anything for a few years.
July 21st, 2009 at 6:08 am
Barnes and Noble has already released, as an iphone app, a crippled version of eReader. Only available in the USA. Colour me unimpressed. Sony seems to be the only major player right now who cares about the non-Americans. I am sticking with them.
July 21st, 2009 at 7:33 am
Cat Faber Says:
Lynch is claiming Barnes and Noble was first? Didn’t Peanut Press have them beat by a considerable margin?
________________________________________________
Peanut press is the ancestor of eReader.
Which was bought by Fictionwise.
Which was bought by B&N.
Sorta like “New” GM taking credit for the work of Ransom Olds, but hey; its not like anybody in the media bothers to check facts anymore.
July 21st, 2009 at 8:29 am
Based on what I have read, B&N will not provide books readable on my Sony, which indicates to me no ePub. I looked at the official announcement and didn’t see anything to indicate ePub support. I am a long-time B&N customer and am not pleased about B&N’s approach to ebooks. I have expressed my dissatisfaction in an email to B&N.
July 21st, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Having “agreed” to the Ebook Reader license agreement without being able to properly read or copy it, I started the installer.
Out of curiosity, I tried clicking on the “Disk cost…” tab, and that locked up the installation. I then accepted the default installation path, and let it install.
Once Installed, I had a generic shortcut icon on my desktop, and when I click on it a windows opens, listing the two free e-books, and “nothing selected”, after which a Winodws pop-up informs me that BN ereader “…has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down”.
In my scoresheet this software rates a “D” for documentation. I’m guessing that the reader will only work when the PC or other device is connected to the B&N website. If so, then this should be called a WEBbook reader, not an “eBook reader”.
In any case, I’ve uninstalled the program. Hopefully, that action will also nullify my “agreement” to the licensing terms, whatever they were…
July 21st, 2009 at 9:33 pm
@Rich: thank you for doing that legwork. My first question was whether their epub books would work on my Sony. Sad to see that probably isn’t the case.
As for B&N’s claims at being first, they were selling PDF-based ebooks at least 10 years ago, if not longer, back when they were the biggest online bookseller (before Amazon.com took off). It was a miserable failure. Peanut Press, I think, started in about 1999, so B&N may have beaten them at starting an ebook business by a very small margin.
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Rita Chang assumes that B&N will be selling the Plastic Logic Reader. Neither company has said that this will be the case.
Plastic Logic does not include eReader in their list of supported formats. They announced (in February) licensing Adobe technology to provide PDF, EPUB and Adobe DRM/eBook support on the device.
B&N (FictionWise) will be creating and running Plastic Logic’s ebook store. B&N seem to be dropping support for Windows Mobile (available for eReader but not for B&N ebooks), and so its Reader software may not run on the WinCE-based Plastic Logic device.
July 23rd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Many thanks for noting the nuances, Alan. To be on the safe side, I’ve changed the head to make clear that B&N is providing the BOOKSTORE, so people don’t confuse an online bookstore with a brick-and-mortar store selling PL machines. Of course that may yet happen. It probably would be no big deal to add the eReader format of the kind that Fictionwise uses. Also please note that eReader itself will be using ePub as a core format, under the DRM. Meanwhile the news release about the B&N/PL deal is here. Thanks again! – David
July 24th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Will authors be able to sell material at the B&N store the way we can at the Kindle store?
July 25th, 2009 at 6:00 am
It looks like B&N has some kind of DRM on the ebooks.
If I buy a bunch of ebooks, and then B&N goes out of business, will I still be able to access my books, or will they be lost?