Barnes & Noble: eBook reader released

The retail bookstore chain Barnes & Noble are said to be re-entering the digital book market by launching “The World’s Largest e-bookstore”, the new e-bookstore is said to have over 700,000 titles, of these 700,000 titles 500,000 are said to be in the public domain and downloadable for free.

Barne’s and Noble previously tried to run an e-book store from 2001-2006, however sales were apparently too low so they decided to close the store. Amazon then released the Kindle, Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX, their book store currently holds 300,000 books and you can download these wirelessly without having to link it to your PC. Due to the success of the Kindle, Barne’s & Noble relaunched its e-bookstore which has now got a larger customer base thanks to ever expanding smartphones.

At the moment Barnes & Noble are said to be working with Plastic Logic to create a device which will compete with the Kindle, it too will be able to wirelessly download e-books, Barnes & Noble are hoping to release this in early 2010.

Barnes & Noble have said that its e-books will not be compatible with the Kindle and Sony’s Reader, however you can display the books on iPhones, BlackBerries, computers and eventually its Plastic Logic device. For more details check out LATimes.