The Nook Arrives

Last Tuesday's announcement by Barnes & Noble that it was entering the e-reader wars by launching the Nook was the culmination of a steady push into the digital space that involved the nation's largest bookseller buying the independent e-bookstore Fictionwise, opening its own e-bookstore, developing several iPhone apps and partnering with Irex Technologies to serve as the e-bookstore for that company's upcoming Que e-reader. But company executives at the Nook launch insisted that there will be plenty of digital developments to follow the Nook, which will not begin shipping until late November.

The $259 e-reader will “serve as the centerpiece of our customer-centric digital strategy,” said B&N.com president William Lynch, who vowed that B&N “plans to be the largest seller of digital content.” He suggested that a textbook e-reader could be in the offing as well as an international edition. The company has also started looking into the possibility of bundling the sales of e-books with print books. B&N clearly has heavily invested in the Nook; at the press conference execs noted that the device was developed by B&N's new Palo Alto, Calif., office, and the cocktail party that followed the launch was probably the biggest in the industry this year, attended by the heads of every major New York publishing house.

While the Nook has a lot of technology features that advance the state of the e-reader, perhaps the most impressive aspect of the device is B&N's plans for using its stores to sell it. Large Nook displays will be located in prime locations in B&N superstores as well as in 17 of its college bookstores. Once in the stores, the Nook's Wi-Fi capability will allow customers to completely browse any e-book B&N is carrying while also offering exclusive content to Nook users. B&N believes its store network will let it quickly become a major factor in the e-reader market. To date, e-book reading continues to be dominated by reading on computers. According to Bowker's PubTrack Consumer statistics for September, 42% of consumers who read e-books do so on a desktop or laptop. The Kindle upped its share in the month, grabbing a 25% slice of the market in September, up from 22% at the end of the first quarter. To begin to approach Kindle's position, B&N's e-reader will need to fulfill one of Lynch's predictions made at the launch—that the Nook will be one of the bestselling products for Christmas.