Digital Library Preserved

"Designed specifically for the iPad, our new B&N eReader will give our customers access to more than one million e-books, magazines and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble e-bookstore, as well as the existing content in their Barnes & Noble [online] digital library," Barnes&Noble.com administrator Paul Hochman wrote on a company blog.

The app will allow customers who have already downloaded content to Barnes & Noble's nook e-reader to access the same material on the iPad, Hochman said.

While the iPad is a direct attack on the nook, which debuted over the holiday season, as well as Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader, the B&N eReader shows that Barnes & Noble is doing everything it can to adjust to the digital age as paper books sit longer on the shelves.

"Barnes & Noble is first and foremost a content retailer, not a gadget maker," said consumer-devices researcher Avi Greengart of Current Analysis. "It is far more important for [the company] to ensure that when -- or if, as the case may be -- reading moves from the physical realm to digital that Barnes & Noble maintains its place in the distribution chain."

Greengart also predicted an iPad app for the Kindle, which is already available for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. The app, he noted, would have to be optimized for the iPad's higher screen resolution.

Stiff Competition

A ChangeWave survey last week found that 40 percent of the firm's research-network members who plan to buy an e-reader in the next 90 days like the iPad, with the second-biggest share going to Kindle, with 28 percent. The nook was a distant third at six percent, and Sony's Reader barely registered at one percent.

But Greengart said the long-term damage posed by the iPad, which starts at $499, to the less-expensive nook might not be substantial.

"Dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle and nook are targeting a different audience than the iPad, where book reading is one feature among many," he said. "The nook is half the price of the least-expensive iPad and includes connectivity without an additional charge. The nook uses completely different screen technology that is better than the iPad for long-form reading and worse than the iPad for anything requiring illustrations, animation or video."

E-book sales in the United States soared to $55,900,000 in the last quarter of 2009, compared with just $16,800,000 in the same period of 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers. An In-Stat forecast in June predicted that worldwide e-book sales will reach $9 billion by 2013.

As the digital market grows, so, too, will consumers' appetites for multiple formats, said ABI Research mobile-devices analyst Jeff Orr.

"This is the natural evolution of electronic content distribution," said Orr. "Each venue has unique attributes that appeal to different audiences."
 

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