RSSBarnes & Noble launches its own e-bookstore
By Angela Gunn | Published July 21, 2009, 8:59 AM
It's an odd time to launch an e-bookstore, in the wake of Amazon's Orwellian book-deletion shenanigans as we are, but Barnes & Noble is jumping in with both feet. The new Barnes & Noble eBookstore launched Monday with over 700,000 titles, leapfrogging it past Amazon's efforts.
The store allows downloads to readers for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the BlackBerry, along with Windows and Mac machines; whatever the reader, it's optimized to the .pdb and .prc file formats. (The readers are free and come with free books -- including, if you register, a Merriam-Webster dictionary, plus access to half a million public-domain books from Google.)
Down the road -- next year, if things go as planned -- the bookstore will have a relationship with Plastic Logic and its planned eReader device. The 8.5" x 11" wireless reader is due out in 2010.
We tried out the store via the reader on a Windows Vista machine, and though even 700,000 titles couldn't meet all our e-book-acquisition needs (did fine on new nonfiction, did fine on public domain fiction, but the Tolkien estate isn't interested in getting me a digital copy of Lord of the Rings through B&N) we found the selection congenial, though periodical readers are out of luck so far.
There are a few collections in place already -- BN Classics (public domain texts, some nicely annotated and hyperlinked), the Library of Essential Readings (a Five-Foot Shelf for the modern era), Twilight, Pulitzer Prize winners, and such. We're not sure how Frank McCourt (author of Angela's Ashes, deceased this past weekend) ended up with a "Discover Great New Writers" tag, but hey. There were 902 books listed for under $5, and most titles seemed to be discounted between 30% and 60% from list.
Texts downloaded quickly, and typefaces generally looked great onscreen; images were rather pixelated. We were able to keep multiple books open with no trouble and found highlighting and adding notes simple and fun. We didn't get a chance to ask B&N to delete without warning a text we'd paid for and annotated, so results on that front remain inconclusive. (We did, however, notice that the FAQ asks readers who notice a title that has incorrectly been labeled as public domain contact Google about it.)
The reader operated mostly without incident, and we liked the option to keep multiple bookshelves for our growing collection. We noticed that once something's in the reader, it's in -- two sample chapters we downloaded couldn't be downloaded through the reader itself and didn't disappear when we deleted them on the Web site until we restarted the reader software.
Affiliates of the various booksellers' sites may, by the way, be interested in one significant difference between B&N's digital-book program and Amazon's: Barnes & Noble told its affiliates via e-mail on Monday that they'll pay out a 6% commission on affiliate-driven sales. Amazon doesn't currently pay any commission on sales for the Kindle.
Overall, it's a nice start, and partnership with Google may help to lessen the likelihood of an Amazon-style meltdown. If you're in the market for an actual standalone e-book reader, you won't have hardware in hand for months yet, but if you already have one of the supported devices and want to dip your toe in the electronic-book waters, fire this up and give it a whirl.
I was pretty disappointed with their titles... I didn't find a single computer book. I'll buy into the first ebook reader that has some kind of service like O'Reilly's Safari, where you pay a subscription and have access to their whole library. The reason I hang out at the book store and read without buying most of the time, is I'm using too little of a book to bother paying for it. A subscription service on a Kindle or the Plastic reader would be convenient and the book sellers would make money from me rather than having me loiter in their stores.
Score: 0
|Here's the reply I finally got from B&N Customer Service after sending them my concerns about using the credit card for a free ebook download
Dear Customer,
Thank you for writing to us regarding our request for credit card
information for a free Barnes & Noble eBook
Please be advised that our request fo a credit card number is used as a
"password" for the eBook file and to protect the publisher's copyright.
Score: 0
|"We didn't get a chance to ask B&N to delete without warning a text we'd paid for and annotated, so results on that front remain inconclusive."
If you are going to try to slam Amazon and milk that story for all it's worth (much like how other writers milk every single thing Mozilla developers do and make an entire news story, sometimes more, about each one), you should at least note that they'd refund your money.
Score: 0
|Would they be willing to reconstruct those lost annotations and notes? And how exactly would they do that? Because those of us who *do* read and annotate would trade those for the cover price any day -- and I say that as someone who swore off e-readers years ago when one she was testing ate her annotations on a 800-page history text.
So to answer your unasked question, damn right I'm going to slam Amazon's actions in that debacle. Every chance I get, in fact. They behaved abominably by not at least warning customers; technical meltdown (such as I experienced with that book) is one thing, but simply throwing a switch shows just how little they thought or cared about the consequences of their actions for *readers*. Bezos years ago went into the book business in part because they were so rectangular and easy to ship, not because of some great love of books; some things really never change!
Score: 0
|Hehe...
Picturing you writing that comment was worth the cover price of *any* book.
...someone's a little bitter. ;)
(with good reason, of course, but it's always fun to watch it happen to "someone else". I think the Germans call it, "schadenfreude".)
Score: 0
|I do have a Kindle, and I do read and annotate.
If you do, too, you'll note that annotations are appended to My Clippings.txt. You'll also notice that you can do with this file as you please, including removing annotations you don't want, adding random text, replacing the entire file with ASCII art of kittens, or deleting the entire file. Future annotations will continue to be added to this file and to books as normal, and past annotations are ... still there in the actual book because they are stored in a separate, book-specific file (hidden on the Kindle but visible on a computer). This book-specific file comes and goes with the book and is synchronized to Amazon's servers (this way you can move books--annotations and all--between devices).
With regards to My Clippings.txt, however, deleting a book from your Kindle does not change this file--the Kindle doesn't expect it to be in any specific format (remember, you can do anything you want to it). So, the best it could even try to do if it wanted to delete all your annotations for a certain book is *guess* by scanning the contents with some sort of regexp resembling the format Amazon uses initially.
In other words, I find it highly improbable (although possible *if* the file has not been significantly touched by the user). Additionally, If a user finds their annotations file so important, it should be backed up, just like any other data. What happens if you lose the Kindle or it malfunctions or hoses is flash memory? Further, since book-specific annotation files *are* stored on Amazon's servers, Amazon *could* access them that way if a user complained and Amazon found the complaint worthy (although to make it human-usable, they'd probably have to dump it to a text file).
So, to answer your annotation-restoration question, they should have gotten removed in the first place. But even if they did, you should have your own backup just as you would with any other data. And even if you didn't do that, the data could still be salvageable from Amazon's servers if you ask nicely. :)
Score: 1
|*shouldn't* have gotten removed, I meant to say in my last paragraph...oops. :)
Score: 0
|Looks like even the free books are DRMed pdb (thus the need for credit card info as a key). Come on B&N! It can't be that hard to include epub support.
Score: 0
|After trying the B&N reader and it's service after reading this and posting here, I found one thing that annoys me a bit. The fact that when selecting a free ebook, you are still required to input your credit card information, even though you are not being charged. It was something that caused me not to continue to retrieve the free ebook and and uninstall the B&N reader.
The reader itself is nicely done, and the service itself seems good to go. But sorry, I just don't see the need to input credit card information when it's not necessary at all. Now if I were to proceed to check out and I added a book that did require purchase, then ask me for my credit card, otherwise a credit card should not be asked for at all.
The Art of War
* Format: eBook
* Price: $0.01
* Please Note: Our Free eBooks will appear in your cart as costing a $0.01.
However, you will be credited for this amount upon checkout.
Score: 1
|Hi Garretthylltun -- thanks for your thoughts, and for coming back to share 'em. I checked (on a computer that does *not* have my B&N information :-) ) and saw the same thing, which appears to be a workaround since most e-commerce sites are alas not good parsing "free." (I'm sure there's at least a *bit* of reel-'em-in thinking at work there too -- get people comfortable with having their credit-card info in there, and sooner or later they'll make a purchase.)
That said? I think B&N -- which so wisely realized that giving people comfy free spaces to sit and nosh and read actually *improves* sales -- would be smart to eliminate that artifact. I don't know their system so I'm just throwing things out here, but if it's just a matter of placating the site's e-commerce mechanisms, surely there's some way of allowing the reader to pass back dummy CC info if there's none submitted, without making it difficult to keep track of one's other information (eg., the titles one has downloaded).
I submit the question to any ecommerce pros in the thread; folks? Assuming that B&N wanted to solve what I agree is sort of a problem, what makes sense here? Or is the problem a *lot* harder than it looks?
Score: 0
|Sounds like a good time for B&N to do this, and it also sounds like their model will work out much better than Amazon's model.
Score: 1
|"It's an odd time to launch an e-bookstore, in the wake of Amazon's Orwellian book-deletion shenanigans as we are, but Barnes & Noble is jumping in with both feet."
IMO, that's exactly why B&N decided to release this now. Not "odd time." Perfect time. Kick em while they're down.
Score: 3
|I was shopping at bn.com years ago. It was a great source for first editions. So ... they are supporting those of us who can't justify the kindle huh?
Score: 1
|