It's Barnes & Noble, not Amazon and Kindle, that's claiming most of the fresh e-reader headlines this week. That isn't because Kindle has finally driven a stake through the famous book retailer -- quite the opposite, in fact: Monday marked the debut of Barnes & Noble's new eBookstore and the promise of a Kindle competitor in Plastic Logic's forthcoming e-reading device, for which the eBookstore will be the exclusive e-book provider.
What's clear with the initial hype over the eBookstore is that Barnes & Noble has a chance to be a legitimate competitor to both Amazon and its Kindle devices. Before now, the Kindle's primary competition has been Sony's Reader and a slew of other dedicated e-reading devices as well as the threat of e-reading applications and multipurpose devices that could eventually make it obsolete.
But unless you count Google's promised partner program for authors to publish their works digitally through Google, the Kindle's been ruling the roost. (At least we're led to think so, not knowing much, if anything, about the true strength of the Kindle and Kindle DX's sales.) So there was bound to be real competition. As Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Channelweb.com some weeks ago, "Competitors will attack Amazon's market position by launching new features, expanding content beyond books, dominating markets outside the U.S., reducing costs and improving relationships with publishers."
If that's the measure of a potential Kindle killer, Barnes & Noble's eBookstore will have its work cut out for it. So far, the eBookstore does not have all that much that's different or new from the Amazon model, and it's also going to exist only in e-tail and application form until next year, when Plastic Logic's e-reader finally hits the market.
It's appropriate to credit Barnes & Noble for getting the eBookstore brand out early -- you can access it on various smartphones, laptops and desktops thanks to the app Barnes & Noble developed through its acquisition of Fictionwise -- but also question its timing with so many months (and so many more potential e-reading competitors) until the device's arrival.
Still, Barnes & Noble's making many good moves so far: meeting Amazon on pricing ($9.99 for new releases and best sellers is the price point for both Kindle and eBookstore), making its new venture a multiplatform experience, and perhaps most importantly, kicking Amazon when it's ... well, if not down, certainly not in the best of lights thanks to recent Kindle public relations snafus. According to Barnes & Noble, the eBookstore's 700,000 titles include public domain books from Google, will hit 1 million titles in 2010, and supports the open e-book standard, EPub, which Amazon Kindle does not.
There are plenty of chinks in Amazon's Kindle armor. Barnes & Noble's challenge now -- if its eBookstore and Plastic Logic reader are really going to compete -- is to find each and every one of them, improve upon what the Kindle can't, and hammer that message home until the e-book marketplace remembers it every time it thinks "Amazon."
What do you think, readers? Barnes & Noble's eBookstore: contender or pretender? Argue your position in the Channelweb community at http://community.crn.com/.
