Barnes & Noble eReader, the Nook

If you're the type of early Christmas shopper who bought a Kindle last week, I hope you kept the receipt, because a newer, equally affordable option is about to hit shelves.

Barnes & Noble (BKS) CEO Steve Riggio on Tuesday took the stage before hundreds of authors, agents, publishers and pundits to debut the company's electronic reader, the Nook.

The Nook will sell for just $259, a steep discount from competitors like the Sony (SNE) Reader and the iRex DR800SG , which both retail for $399. The price suggests Barnes & Noble is going straight for Amazon (AMZN), which recently lowered the Kindle's price to $259.

The Nook uses the same screen technology that powers Amazon's Kindle, but adds an iPhone-like color touchscreen below for easy navigation. Readers have access to 3G wireless on AT&T's broadband network.  The reader holds up to 1,500 books (like its major competitor), but an expandable memory slot allows readers to add up to 17,500 more. "You're getting a lot of eReader for the money," says Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Another novel experiment: lending. Barnes & Noble lets readers share titles with friends on any platform in the Barnes & Noble ecosystem. So you like the "Tipping Point?" Buy it for your Nook and lend it to your sister to read on her Barnes & Noble iPhone application. (She'd better not procrastinate; she has 14 days before it disappears.)

Barnes & Noble will turn its massive retail presence into a competitive advantage. Over the next few weeks, the bookstore chain will roll out Nook displays in its 700 stores and 600 college bookstores. Through complimentary Wi-Fi connections in all the stores, readers will be able to browse eBooks on their readers just as they might have always browsed the shelves.

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Tyrese Gibson's Mayhem is a comic book – the first standalone print publication for sale in Apple's iTunes LP format.

Tyrese Gibson’s Mayhem is the first digital book for sale on iTunes 9 – perhaps an early sign of Apple’s (AAPL) desire to take on Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle and Sony’s (SNE) Reader in the digital book market.

I would have missed the significance of Mayhem on iTunes if I hadn’t run into Gibson himself on Wednesday. After the Steve Jobs iPod keynote, I spotted the actor/singer known for roles in action movies like Transformers 2 in the demo area where attendees were playing with the new iPods and software. He had a laptop open and was doing a few TV interviews about his Mayhem project, and its debut on iTunes.

Gibson isn’t the first person you’d expect to make a mark in the comic book business. For one, he’s not a longtime comic book fan – he only recently got interested in the medium while attending the Comic-Con convention to promote the movie Death Race. After seeing the devotion of die-hard fans there, he was determined to get in on the action – and he conceived of Mayhem, a vigilante tale with a diverse cast of characters. More

Sony Reader

In what is fast shaping up to be a war in the e-reader marketplace, Sony (SNE) has launched the latest salvo, a sub-$300 touch-screen "Reader Touch Edition" and the $199 "Reader Pocket Edition," which features a 5-inch display. The company is also lowering prices of ebooks. New releases and best-sellers will all be $9.99, matching Amazon’s (AMZN) price point for the first time.

In addition to lowering prices, adding a touch-screen and trimming form factor, Sony is also attempting to differentiate itself by opening the ebook market place. It offers free access to the 1 million public-domain books digitized through the Google Books Project, and ebooks purchased at Sony’s store, which use the standard EPUB format, can be shared on any combination of six PCs and e-reader devices. Owners of the Sony devices can download ebooks in the library for 21 days.

It’s ironic that Sony would play open-standards champion, given its rich history of proprietary technologies (Betamax, Memory Stick, etc.), but Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Division, says the company is committed to openness as a way to hasten the move from paper to digital.

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Book retailer partners with Plastic Logic and Google to take on rival Amazon.

The world’s largest bookseller has taken the wraps off the world’s largest e-bookstore. Barnes & Noble (BN) announced yesterday the availability of more than 700,000 digital e-books, along with free e-reader software for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac and PC platforms. “It’s a unique every-device strategy,” said William Lynch, president of BN.com in a conference call.

The strategy is clearly aimed at Amazon.com (AMZN) and its popular Kindle e-reader, which I wrote about recently here, as well as the eReader from Sony (SNE). Like Amazon, BN is offering many new releases and best-sellers for $9.99. Unlike Amazon, Barnes & Noble will also allow users to download nearly a half-million public-domain books for free, courtesy of a partnership with Google (GOOG). More

It took Amazon (AMZN) less than a month after the release of the second-generation Kindle electronic-book reader to put a free Kindle application on the iPhone App Store. It took another two months for it to fix the app's second most annoying drawback (after the iPhone's tiny screen): the hoops you had to jump through to buy new titles.

Amazon solved that problem Monday morning by launching a Kindle store "optimized" for the iPhone. Before if you wanted to buy a book for the iPhone, you had to get it from your Kindle (if you had one), or from Amazon via a computer, or from Amazon's site as viewed through the iPhone's browser — not a user-friendly experience.

Now iPhone users can buy directly from within the Kindle application through a new interface that works like an iPhone app should and doesn't require a magnifying glass.

It's no mystery why Amazon keeps showing the iPhone its love. The company hasn't released sales figures for either the Kindle 1 and the Kindle 2, but according to press reports, it has probably sold 700,000 to 800,000 of the devices in their first 18 months.

Apple (AAPL), by contrast, has sold some 37 million iPhones and iPod touches.

And since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has made it clear that he is far more interested in selling e-books than he is in selling Kindles, it makes sense for him to put his content on as many devices as he can — and to make reading that content as seamless as possible.

At the launch of the Kindle 2, Amazon VP Ian Freed said that the company was working hard to bring Kindle apps to a variety of existing smartphones, starting with the ones that offer the best reading experience.

Apparently that was the iPhone, because there's no sign yet of a Kindle app for Research in Motion (RIMM), Android (GOOG), Symbian (NOK) or Mobile Windows (MSFT) phones.

UPDATE: iLounge's Charles Starrett points out that there could be a small wrinkle in the Apple-Amazon relationship: By selling its e-books directly to readers, Amazon may have found a way to avoid the 30% cut Apple will start taking this summer when it opens the App Store to so-called " in-app purchasing."

The new Kindle store, writes Starrett, "appears to be a workaround to enable easy purchasing without Apple revenue sharing."

See also:

• Amazon’s Kindle hits the iPhone
• Amazon’s Kindle: Did Steve Jobs blow it?
• Amazon unveils the new Kindle 2

If there was ever any question that Amazon's (AMZN) Jeff Bezos is more interested in selling books than selling Kindle electronic book readers, the answer showed up on the iTunes App Store overnight Wednesday: a free application to read Kindle books on Apple's (AAPL) iPhone.

Given that there are more than 17 million iPhones in circulation and probably not more than a few hundred thousand Kindles, Amazon has, with a single stroke, vastly increased the size of its potential readership without necessarily boosting sales for its $359 reader.

The app, which you can download here, works pretty much as advertised. You can't order books directly from the iPhone — you have to do that from a Kindle or through a Web browser. But once you've established that you have an Amazon account, the books you've ordered show up instantly — and wirelessly — on the screen, thanks to the magic of Amazon's new Whispersync technology. If you've started to read a book on a Kindle, Whispersync is smart enough to remember what page you were on.

There are plenty of titles to choose from in the Kindle Books section of the Amazon store — more than 240,000, according to Amazon's press release — although as you might expect, the list is heavily tilted toward current bestsellers (104 of the 112 titles on New York Times' list, most for $9.99 each).

At the store, you can arrange books by popularity ("The Shack" by William P. Young currently tops that list), customer review (Ron Paul's "The Revolution") or publication date ("Eye of the Beholder," Jade Falconer).

But you get a better feel for the range of books available when you list them by price, high-to-low or low-to-high. The most expensive title is something called "Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (Part 4)," which sells for $6,431.20. On the other end of the spectrum, there are pages and pages of books priced at $0.00, including Arnold Bennett's "Sacred and Profane Love" and Hugh Dalton's "With British Guns in Italy," to name a couple at random.

The books are certainly readable on the iPhone, although I'm not sure anybody is going to make it through Doris Kearns Goodwin's 944-page "Team of Rivals" (No. 16 on the Kindle bestseller list) on a 3.5-inch screen. The pages are formatted for Kindle, not the iPhone, which creates some unfortunate typographical effects. At right, for example, is what the preface page of Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father" looks like on the iPhone, with an ugly and unnecessary break in the word "preface."

All in all, the reading experience on Kindle for iPhone falls somewhere between Google's (GOOG) free iPhone Book Search app, with 1.5 million titles to choose from but minimal formatting, and Andrew Kaz's $2.99 Classics, which offers only a dozen or so books, but each of them specially formatted for the iPhone screen.

And that's probably as it should be.

See also:

• Amazon unveils the new Kindle 2
• Amazon's Kindle: Did Steve Jobs blow it?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was pretty dismissive of Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader when it first came out. "The whole conception is flawed at the top," he told the New York Times a little over a year ago, pointing out that 40% of Americans make it through one book a year or less. "People don’t read anymore."

The launch Monday of the Kindle 2 after 14 months of strong sales — as many as 500,000 units, according to one analyst (Amazon does not release sales figures) — has led some second-guessing among Apple watchers.

"Why don't we own this market?" asked one investor on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board (AFB). "Apple had ALL the elements here, the capacity to design, the money to market, and the distribution system already in place via the App Store and the iTunes Store." (link)

It's an interesting question, with an unsual twist.  Although Apple and Amazon are both making white hand-held electronic devices these days, they come at it from very different directions.

Amazon (AMZN) is primarily an electronic retailer; it ventured into manufacturing with the Kindle to drive sales of titles from its huge online bookstore.

Apple (AAPL) is an electronics manufacturing company; it provides music, movies, apps and even some books on the iTunes Store primarily to drive sales of Macs, iPods and iPhones.

Both companies are profitable — but Amazon is much less so, which drives Apple investors crazy. Even as Wall Street has been rewarding Amazon for finally breaking into the black, it has been pummeling Apple.

"The Kindle is a good product.  Amazon is a good company," wrote another commentator on AFB. "Notwithstanding that, the P/E disparity is staggering."

He has a point. Check out the tale of the tape:

Apple is three times the size of Amazon and nearly four times as profitable, yet Amazon trades at 44.7 times earnings while Apple closed Monday at less than 20. And that's not including the growing stash of deferred revenue Apple is squirreling away from sales of iPhones. (See Spotlight on Apple's hidden revenue stream.)

Of course it's not too late for Apple to get into the e-reader market, should its management team overcome its CEO's skepticism about America's reading habits.

Meanwhile, Amazon has signaled that it is willing, once some technical hurdles have been overcome, to let iPhone owners read the books in its electronic library — as long as they buy a Kindle first.

In fact, Jeff Bezos is convinced that anybody who tries to read a book on a smartphone will quickly see the virtue of a dedicated e-reader.

"If you are going to read for a couple of hours, you are going to have problems with battery life with a mobile phone, you are going to have eye strain and you are going to have problems with screen size," he told the New York Times yesterday. "Reading is an important activity and deserves a purpose-built device."

Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle has a skinny sister — the Kindle 2.

At a press conference Monday morning in Manhattan, CEO Jeff Bezos introduced a thinner, lighter and faster version of the company's surprisingly popular handheld electronic book reader. The price is the same — $359 — and it goes on sale today for delivery in 15 days.

The new device looks very much like the old one, with these improvements:

• Thinner: 0.36 inches thick, 25% thinner than an iPhone
• Quicker: Turns pages 20% faster
• Longer lasting: 25% increase in battery life
• Better display: 16 shades of gray (was 4)
• Bigger memory: Stores up to 1,500 books
• Bigger vocabulary: Built-in 250,000 dictionary
• Better navigation: With a 5-way joystick
• More vocal: Able to read text aloud in a semi-robotic voice
• Less accident prone: The page-turn buttons are smaller and harder to hit by mistake
• More wired: New Whispersync technology (more below)

"We want the Kindle to disappear," said Bezos before a packed audience in the basement of Manhattan's Carnegie Library. "It's designed so nothing interferes with that incredibly pleasurable mental flow-state you get into when you are reading a good book."

Bestselling thriller author Stephen King read from new a short story — "Ur" — that is available, for now, exclusively on the Kindle. "I'm the entertainment," he quipped.

The original Kindle allowed users to download books (standard price: $9.99) wirelessly from the Internet using a built-in 3G cellular modem.

The Kindle 2 goes one step further. The new Whispersync technology allows users to pause in their reading on, say, a Kindle 1, and pick up where they left off on a Kindle 2 and, eventually, on future wireless devices — a phrase Bezos left tantalizingly vague. Earlier reports suggested that the company's electronic library of 230,000 books would be available on various cell phones including Google's (GOOG) Android phones and Apple's (AAPL) iPhone.

Ian Freed, VP for Kindle, said the company was working "as quickly as possible" to bring Whispersync to a variety of existing smartphones, starting with the ones that offer the best reading experience. He declined to give a timeframe.

Amazon has never released Kindle sales figures, nor would its spokespeople confirm analyst estimates that it has sold as many as 500,000 units of the original model. The company had trouble keeping up with demand through much of 2008, especially after Oprah Winfrey endorsed the device on national television, calling it "my new favorite thing in the world."

Click here for the press release.

Jeff Bezos didn't actually call Amazon's (AMZN) new Kindle e-book reader the iPod of anything. The phrase was Steve Levy's, who used it high up in his Newsweek cover story.

"Though Bezos is reluctant to make the comparison," he wrote, "Amazon believes it has created the iPod of reading." (link)

Never mind that book reading seems to be a dying art while the appetite for passive entertainment with a soundtrack grows unabated. Or that Apple (AAPL) has sold more than 100 million iPods, while total sales of e-book readers is probably about 100,000, according to today's Wall Street Journal. Or that Sony (SNE), Philips, Xerox, Gemstar, iRex, and Barnes and Noble have all built e-readers that never quite caught on — at least not well enough to achieve iPod status.

Still, Levy's phrase became the metaphor — or is it a simile? — that launched a hundred flattering headlines.

• Wall Street Journal: "The iPod of eBook Readers?"
• AppleInsider: "Amazon's New Kindle Dubbed the iPod of Reading,"
• Gizmodo: "Amazon Kindle Official details: $399, 'Whispernet' EV-DO, the 'iPod of Reading' "
• Pocket-lint: "Amazon Unveils 'the iPod of Reading' "
• Electronista: "Amazon Intros Kindle, the 'iPod of Reading'"

And so on. A Google News search on "iPod of reading" turned up more than 580 stories this morning, many of them using the phrase, a few attributing it to Bezos.

More broadly, a Google search of "the iPod of" anything turns up more than 760,000 hits. You'll find the iPod of phones, the iPod of printers, the iPod of cars, the iPod of the brain, the iPod of recovery, the iPod of integration, the iPod of for-pay Internet video, the iPod of the hotel industry, and yes, the iPod of spin.

The iPod, it seems, has become an all-purpose metaphor, short-hand that saves publicists, journalists, bloggers and everybody else the necessity of having to think too hard about what something actually is.

What is Kindle? You can see the specs on Amazon's product page. But this is a case where watching a video may be more useful than reading about it (dying art, remember?). To see Amazon's demo, click on the image below.