Barnes & Noble Makes AT&T Wi-Fi Free

Barnes & Noble, hard on the heels of its decision to compete with the Amazon Kindle with its own e-book reader, on Tuesday said it will work with AT&T to provide complementary in-store Wi-Fi.

AT&T's Wi-Fi network has been available at Barnes & Noble stores since 2005, but only for paying customers of AT&T's service. What is new is that any visitor at any of the company's stores will be able to access AT&T's Wi-Fi network at no charge, according to Barnes & Noble.

Barnes & Noble said customers will be able to use the service to freely download and preview any of more than 700,000 e-books currently available, a number the company expects to increase to one million in the near future. Among those titles are hundreds of thousands of public domain titles available from Google, Barnes & Noble said.

Barnes & Noble earlier this month unveiled two e-book ventures. The first, Barnes & Noble eBookstore, is an online retail outlet for e-books. The second is an exclusive partnership to provide its e-books on a new e-reader device from Plastic Logic that could compete with the Amazon Kindle.

With the free AT&T Wi-Fi service, customers eventually will be able to opt in to receive Barnes & Noble messages such as a coupon to the in-store cafe or information about book signings, other in-store events or new releases.

Customers also can download two free Barnes & Noble applications that were unveiled earlier this month.

These include the Barnes & Noble Bookstore application that allows iPhone and iPod Touch customers to browse the bookstore's titles, recommended lists and new releases, and access a calendar of Barnes & Noble events.

The application also allows users to take a photo of the front cover of a book with the iPhone's built-in camera and immediately get details of the book and find and reserve a copy in the nearest Barnes & Noble store.

The second application is the Barnes & Noble eReader, which allows users to access and read more than 700,000 e-book titles on an iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry smartphone, PC and Mac. In addition to more than 500,000 public domain titles available, Barnes & Noble also sells e-book versions of new releases and best-sellers for $9.99.