Barnes & Noble expected to launch e-book reader called ‘nook’ to compete with Amazon’s Kindle

Barnes & Noble expected to unveil e-reader: ‘nook’

NEW YORK — Barnes & Noble Inc. Inc. is expected to unveil an electronic-book reader Tuesday to compete with Amazon.com’s Kindle in the still-small arena where some see bookselling’s future.

A wireless reader on Barnes & Noble’s Web site called the “nook” is available for “pre-order” for $259 — the same as the recently reduced Kindle. Less than 5 inches wide and 8 inches tall and weighing 11.2 ounces, the nook is the size and weight of a paperback book, according to the Web site.

The reader has 2 gigabytes of memory, a slot for adding up to 16 gigabytes more and a 3.5-inch color touch screen below the page display. It also serves as an MP3 player and users can upload photos to it. There was speculation in blogs that it will let users loan e-books to other people.

Barnes & Noble executives did not return calls for comment Tuesday.

The largest U.S. book store chain is only the latest company to enter the e-reader market, which Kindle has dominated since its 2007 launch. Sony has sold e-readers since 2006 and plans to launch a new version with a touch screen and wireless downloading capability via AT&T in December. Smaller companies IREX Technologies Inc. and Plastic Logic Ltd. also plan to offer e-readers soon.

So far, e-readership is small.

“Only 8 percent of the U.S. adult population bought one e-book in 2008,” and most read them on PCs, said Michael Norris, senior analyst at research firm Simba Information. “So it’s a device that is extremely important to everyone except 92 percent of American adults.”

Still, the niche is growing fast in an industry that is slumping. Forrester Research predicts 3 million e-readers will sell in the U.S. in 2009, and twice as many in 2010.

Sales have been falling for years at Barnes & Noble and other brick-and-mortar booksellers — mainly chief rival Borders Inc., which sells Sony e-readers in some stores — as shoppers turn to online and discount booksellers. The recession also led consumers to slash their spending on discretionary items like books and music.

Barnes & Noble hopes the e-reader and the company’s new e-bookstore, launched in July, will boost sales. The e-bookstore, which sells versions of books to read on smart phones and other mobile devices and most personal computers, offers 700,000 books, including the more than half-million offered free by Google Inc. It plans to offer up to 1 million within a year, as well as magazines and newspapers.

Amazon.com meanwhile offers about 350,000 books for the Kindle, and Sony offers about 600,000, including Google’s free titles.

When Barnes & Noble launched its e-bookstore, it was to be the exclusive provider of books for a reader from Plastic Logic to be released in 2010. It was not clear Tuesday afternoon whether Plastic Logic makes the e-book soon to be announced.

For Barnes & Noble and Amazon, e-book readers may be customer retention tools more than anything else because owners must buy proprietary versions of books to use the devices. And Barnes & Noble has the advantage that it can feature its e-reader in its stores, said Norris.

“If you buy something from Amazon, you can’t touch it first,” he said. “Barnes & Noble presumably will have big showcases for these in all of its superstores…. Barnes & Noble, knowing full well that Amazon isn’t as big in e-books as it wants people to think, is hoping that the fact they can get consumers to hold a reasonably priced e-book device in their hand … will target their device to the right people.”

On the Net:

www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/techspecs/