By Brenon Daly
Nearly six months after picking up a startup that developed an application for reading e-books, Barnes & Noble (BKS) put some of that technology to work last week as it opened what it is calling the world’s largest electronic bookstore. In early March, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise for $15.7m, which allows the company to offer books for users of Blackberry phones [Research in Motion (RIMM)], iPhones [Apple (AAPL)] and other devices. The firm also plans to expand the devices available early next year, when Plastic Logic’s e-Reader is released.
That’s all well and good, but we wonder why Barnes & Noble is moving so slowly into the digital realm. The world’s largest bookseller won’t even have it’s ‘Kindle killer’ in the market until about a year after the Fictionwise purchase, by which time Amazon.com will have hundreds of thousands of its e-book readers in customers’ hands. (Meanwhile, Sony (SNY) has had a version of its e-book Reader out for nearly three years, although it has had rather muted success.)
Granted, the digital book sector is a tiny slice of the overall $25bn book market. And clearly, other retailers have struggled with balancing their online sales strategy with the brick-and-mortar reality. But we would think that Barnes & Noble would want to push into this growth segment more aggressively. After all, it recently guided that sales at its bookstores open for more than a year will decline by some 4% in 2009.
