Amazon may finally have some competition for ebooks since Barnes and Noble has decided to forgo creating a dedicated device of their own like Amazon’s Kindle or Sony Reader. No. They want to make their ebooks available on “any device, any time, anywhere.”
The company has plans to start with 700,000 ebooks to eventually make available up to 1 million ebooks to its consumers within the year where over half will be ebooks made free by Google. Also B&N plans to be the sole provider of ebooks for Plastic Logic, another ebook reading device coming out maybe next year?
What has puzzled about B&N’s acquisition of Fictionwise is that they seem to all still operate independently of each other (ereader.com, Fictionwise and now B&N). For example eReader.com boasts of selling almost all new releases at $9.95 but on Fictionwise’s own website, those same titles are being sold at a much higher price. I don’t see how this makes any sense but then I’m just the lowly consumer.
The website must still be beta as some areas are not as easily acessed as others. I like many others downloaded the branded ereader app thinking that I could easily download my ebooks from Fictionwise. Ha. No such luck. I wonder if this is something that will be added in a future update? I hope so as I do like the colorful version of the branded ereader.
via AP
