The ebook space heats up:
Barnes & Noble … announced today the launch of the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, the world’s largest eBookstore, on Barnes & Noble.com, enabling customers to buy eBooks and read them on a wide range of platforms, including the iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry® smartphones, as well as most Windows® and Mac® laptops or full-sized desktop computers. In addition, Barnes & Noble announced that it will be the exclusive eBookstore provider on the forthcoming and much anticipated Plastic Logic eReader device. [more...]
Some thoughts/questions:
- Competition is good – we can now see four-and-a-half big players in the ebook retail market: Amazon/Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Apple (not yet really in the game, but surely coming), and Google (not yet really in the game, but announced); as well as Indigo’s Shortcovers.
- How will competition affect the consumer? Surely this means downward price pressure, which is good.
- How will competition affect the publishers? This is the big question. For my money the big problem with the business is the pricing model. And the problem is that to date, it’s been approached with a discount/markup structure mimicking the bricks & mortar world. Kindle is taking a 60% discount on sales — the same as their physical book pricing scheme — meaning that all the cost savings of digital go into Amazon’s pocket. That can’t be sustainable in the long run, especially if consumer want to pay less for electronic books. So, what happens if Barnes & Noble offers a more competitive price structure (say a 70/30 publisher/retailer split)? I hope for publishers sake they take this route. In any case, having more than one retailer in etown seems like a good thing for the book market.
- Formats. Does this mean yet another proprietary format? God help us all. (What happened to ePub?) … How about an open, interoperable standard for ebooks, in addition to PDF to maintain page design?
- Devices. Please sell ebooks so that people can read them however they want. See above.
- DRM? See: DRM? Dead? Yes, But Only For Music.
- How big an impact will Apple have when they move into this market? For popular titles, it will be huge, I think.
- How big an impact will Google have when they move into this market? For backlists, it will be huge, I think.
What questions does this announcement (long-awaited) raise for you? Is it good or bad? And what impact will it have on the evolving market?
7 Comments
i’m struck by the huge lack of reaction
in response to your requests on twitter
for comments to this post. no one cares.
-bowerbird
um, it looks like your system ate the comment
before mine — from someone named “dave”,
who doubted b&n could compete with amazon –
so perhaps that’s why there are no comments…
Dave was (clever) linkspam (leading to 1creditscoreUSA dot come or something similar).
As for whether people care, it’s always a bit of a mystery what posts etc will garner reactions.
Since the majority (500K) of 700K titles in B&N’s ebookstore are public domain Google books, it appears Google is already in the game, if indirectly.
Indeed Google is in the game, but not yet as an *ebook retailer* – able to dictate prices to publishers and/or compete directly against Amazon (for consumers & for publishers).
> linkspam
ok. but i would agree that b&n probably cannot compete with amazon.
as for google, they’ll be in the game if their “settlement” is approved.
indeed, they will be well on the way to being the only game in town…
(because there’s no question that google can compete with amazon.)
-bowerbird
with or without the settlement, publishers can (and already do) do deals with Google for their Book Search program for in copyright work.
i think you’re right though – B&N will have a tough time competing with Amazon.