With Amazon poised on becoming the dominant force in ebook content, the rest of the booksellers are starting to make their move. Last month, Borders UK rolled out its ebook storefront, which provides content for the Elonex reader exclusively for the UK market.
This time, it’s Barnes & Noble getting in on the action, with a seemingly more aggressive stance. According to reports, the company is expanding its ebook store’s availability into different devices, including the iPhone, Blackberry and the long-awaited Plastic Logic e-reader.
Over 700,000 titles will be available for sale from Barnes & Noble’s store. Along with it, the company will offer the over half a million free public domain books from Google. In contrast, Amazon’s Kindle store currently feature only around 300,000 titles, none of which are for free.
While Barnes & Noble appears to be making a big deal of its partnership with Plastic Logic, I’m willing to gander that more people will be excited with the promise to offer it on cell phone platforms. With the coming of smartbooks, in particular, a dedicated e-reader might actually be pushed out even further.
No schedule has been given about the project, which is a bit disappointing. Barnes & Noble’s ebook platform will support the popular ePub format, instead of a proprietary file.
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