After Amazon had a tough time last week with a pair of Kindle-related public relations snafus, it stood to reason things might be on an upswing for Amazon and its Kindle good cheer this week. Not so, it appears: not only is Amazon still dealing with the fallout surrounding a lawsuit over cracked Kindle screens and frenzy over its redaction of George Orwell's
1984, but it's now in the cross hairs of yet another competitor: Barnes & Noble and its new eBookstore.
Barnes & Noble's eBookstore push probably couldn't have come at a more opportune moment. While no one would dare count Amazon's mighty book retailing establishment or the Kindle out too soon, Barnes & Noble's venture, which is both an e-bookstore and a partnership with would-be Kindle rival Plastic Logic, represents some of the first really significant competition Amazon's had since the debut of the Kindle 2 back in February and the upswing in consumer and tech observer interest in all things e-book.
Barnes & Noble has plenty of weapons in its arsenal, too including matching Amazon on pricing, the deal with Plastic Logic for a companion device and, most importantly, a multiplatform approach that puts eBookstore on Apple iPhones, RIM BlackBerry phones and other crucial platforms.
But timing is everything, and it's clear that the Kindle 2's buzz -- itself propelled by the arrival of the larger Kindle DX in May -- has waned. Everybody wants a piece of Amazon's e-reading action, whether on the controversy side or the devicemaker competion side, or, if you're Taiwan's Prime View International, the back-end manufacturing side (thanks to PVI's acquisition of Kindle screen technology maker E-Ink).
But apart from a few stray devices and apps and the less-definite threat of when a dedicated e-reading device would become obsolete, Amazon has thus far soldiered on with Kindle without much name-brand competition. Let's face it: Interread and Plastic Logic just don't have the cache that the Amazon name does, and Sony, while certainly a known quantity all over the world, didn't see its Sony Reader catch fire the way the Kindle did.
Barnes & Nobie's eBookstore changes that game: a veteran book retailer, the company now has even more means to compete with Amazon's e-retailing behemoth on the book side, and a chance to extend its own already-well-known brand into twenty-first century digital book technology. Granted, it tried that already -- Barnes & Noble's first e-book sales efforts through its Web site petered out in late 2003 -- but that was six years ago, when e-reading was still by and large a quaint concept and not a headline-magnet like it is now.
Barnes & Noble had to get an e-reading strategy in place, and so it did (et tu Borders?). Its acquisition of eReader.com owner Fictionwise in March was certainly all the clue anybody needed. With the eBookstore in place and Plastic Logic's exclusive eBookstore e-reader on the horizon -- not to mention Google's coming partner program for authors to sell digital works through Google -- the next question for Amazon is: what else you got?
