Contact: Brenon Daly
Nearly six months after picking up a startup that developed an application for reading e-books, Barnes & Noble put some of that technology to work last week as it opened what it is calling the world’s largest electronic bookstore. In early March, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise for $15.7m, which allows the company to offer books for users of Blackberry phones, iPhones and other devices. The firm also plans to expand the devices available early next year, when Plastic Logic’s e-Reader is released.
That’s all well and good, but we wonder why Barnes & Noble is moving so slowly into the digital realm. The world’s largest bookseller won’t even have it’s ‘Kindle killer’ in the market until about a year after the Fictionwise purchase, by which time Amazon.com will have hundreds of thousands of its e-book readers in customers’ hands. (Meanwhile, Sony has had a version of its e-book Reader out for nearly three years, although it has had rather muted success.)
Granted, the digital book sector is a tiny slice of the overall $25bn book market. And clearly, other retailers have struggled with balancing their online sales strategy with the brick-and-mortar reality. But we would think that Barnes & Noble would want to push into this growth segment more aggressively. After all, it recently guided that sales at its bookstores open for more than a year will decline by some 4% in 2009.