Barnes and Noble, the United State's largest book seller has filed with the FCC its own e-book reader, as it's insinuated in the attached Agent Authorization Letter. The dipping of the toes into the digital text industry isn't as peculiar as, say
Discovery Communications, since Barnes and Noble already has some known precedence in the e-book reader market,
partnering with Plastic Logic as their "exclusive eBookstore provider" -- this may very well be the Plastic Logic reader, but there's no indication one way or another. Chances are it'll be some time before we know, as all external and internal photos are under a confidentiality extension for 180 days as of September 3rd, or about six months from now. See you in Spring 2010!
posted Sep 18th 2009 7:04PM
This device has GSM/GPRS and UMTS (3G) as well as WiFi (see FCC disclosure). Sure looks like Plastic Logic.
I like that I can see an IMEI serial number on the picture displayed. This would mean that the reader is connected through a mobile network and will most likely be able to pull content from there.
Wouldn't Amazon be the biggest book seller?
Presumably he means traditional book seller?
Hopefully B&N understands that they are late to the game and need to do something new. Like provide supports for all major ebook formats (including .lit), not just their own unique rarely used version. I doubt they will understand that though.
I'm pretty sure they're not investing hard cash into a fairly new market just to have all potential customers run to Google Books to download free shit. Expect this to be severely locked down.
The PlasticLogic reader supports text, pdf and epub formats as well as a lot of other document oriented formats. Epub is not a proprietary format. It has been adopted by Sony as the format for its readers and ebook store. BooksonBoard sells epub format ebooks and so does Barnes & Noble and some publishers. The market is rapidly developing to epub v. Kindle. B&N is going the right direction so far.
@Kryten
Barnes & Noble sells eReader format NOT ePub. Also ePub may not be a proprietary format, but ePub using Adobe Adept DRM is. eReader/Fictionwise is working on putting out ePub with eReader style DRM which basically makes it a different format unless a reading device has support for both brands of DRM.
Its just as I predicted. Michael Jackson is planing this from the great beyond.
Don't forget that B&N bought fictionwise/ereader a few months ago, who were the leaders in ebook publishing.
So, they've already got themselves into the game and can probably leverage that back-catalogue to sell hardware if they're sensible about making it easy to read ebooks in lots of formats on this device.
The thing with GoogleBooks is that most are old, IE, Mark Twain, Jules Verne type titles, you will get your hardcore fans of those authors downloading for free, but in the end, most people will pay for new books.
The problem with GoogleBooks is that most titles are old, IE, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, William Defoe, you will get your hardcore classic fans downloading, but in the end, most people will want the current best sellers and more recent favorite authors.
Damn you Engadget, my comment doesnt post, i redo it, and they both post, I just thought everyone else wanted something to complain about.
B&N, AT&T and Apple have a new secret.
Fuck Apple.
mmm.. this B&N does sound a lot like the upcoming iRex Technologies device to be released during 4Q
I really want to buy an eBook reader of some sort but they are ALL too expensive. Lower the price please. Lower the price please. Lower the price please. Lower the price please. Lower the price please.
Kindle 2 is $299 and that includes free wireless access anywhere (including basic web browsing) in the country.
Do you know how much a data subscription like that would be if you had to pay for it separately? A hell of a lot more than $299.
Anything you'd get right now that falls under $250 is going to be junk, because e-ink isn't cheap.
I may be selling my Kindle. I've not been impressed with the way Amazon has been behaving lately.
You mean their apology and change of policy for their handling of the "1984" issue?
Should we continue to vilify them for past mistakes that have been corrected? Do you think that Barnes and Noble could not have made that mistake when caught between copyright law and users?
I hear that. I had been tracking the Kindle for a while but the Animal Farm fiasco totally turned me off. Never.
@Tagbert
And Amazon somehow has guaranteed they will never do anything like it again? Right, they're word is worth nothing to me. Once is all it takes. Amazon eBook buyers are licensing the content. They will never own it. What happens when congress passes a new copyright law? What happens when Amazon is purchased by a super-corp? What happens when the contract with the connectivity provider blows up? Too much is in flux. I'll wait until there is an eBook reader that lets me own my books.
It's like NONE of you ever reads or pays attention...
You DO own your books. Whenever you make a Kindle edition purchase, you have the ability and right to download the book TO YOUR COMPUTER and save it on whatever media you want. CD, DVD, External device... It's YOURS. If Amazon removes a book from your online archive, you need only sync to your local backup and keep reading.
The amount of outright lying and ignorance regarding this aspect of Amazon's Kindle edition sales is astounding. There's nothing stopping you from keeping the books on your computer hard drive, and the Kindle itself doesn't "lock out" books you purchased, even if they did recall them from the online archive.
Nobody reached into people's Kindles and deleted anything. They removed the book from the online archive, and it simply wasn't there to sync when people synced their Kindle. Amazon didn't magically destroy every downloaded copy of those books.
All my Kindle books are sitting on my laptop hard drive, untouched and unmolested by Amazon.
People who don't know what the hell they're talking about should stop spreading FUD.
The provider is very likely AT&T since their WiFi is provided by them for all stores nationwide, and always has been (prior to free WiFi service).
Also, I work for B&N. :)
You're super fired.
Just take that FCC schematic, MSpaint in some books and enter it for Engadgets upcoming "design a Barnes and Noble e-book reader contest for the easy win.
I work for B&N, and I think this is going to be available around the holidays, or at least very early next year.
However, can I just take a moment to encourage everyone to NOT buy from Barnes and Noble? This company does not recycle (much), and actually encourages waste, plus they do not treat their employees well. I don't have time to go into detail, but it's the truth.
Support your local bookshops instead--or even Borders or Amazon, for pete's sake. B&N is soulless.
Dear Engadget:
UNITED STATES'
The current iteration, "United State's," indicates only one united state. Which state? Wisconsin? Maine? Alaska? C'mon, inquiring minds want to know!
And it's running Android, supports wifi and 3G (AT&T) with a color screen. It's named Nook.