Back in December, after it moved a key executive into the position of Director of Digital Content, we speculated that Barnes & Noble might be contemplating a second assault on the ramparts of the e-book industry. Today the ramparts fell with the news that the retail giant has acquired Fictionwise, the world’s leading e-book retailer for $15.7 million.

With this single stroke, B&N comes roaring back into a business it abandoned in 2003. Of far greater significance is that B&N is now catapulted back onto a competitive footing with amazon.com in the all-important e-book arena. Though Barnes & Noble doesn’t boast a Kindle or any other proprietary e-book reader, there is a host of devices now available or soon to come on stream capable of carrying the immense body of e-book content that Fictionwise has aggregated.

Fictionwise’s multiformat feature enables subscribers to download books in such platforms as Adobe, Palm, Sony, iPhone and even Kindle itself. In January 2008, Fictionwise acquired eReader, the principal Palm-format etailer and reinforced the widely held view that it is the team to beat in the digital book major leagues.

Fictionwise was created in 2000 as a partnership between Steve Pendergrast and his brother Scott’s Mindwise Media, LLC. They subsequently spun Fictionwise off. Starting modestly with digital reprints of science fiction short stories, it was not long before its cutting edge e-book delivery system, brilliant metrics, and author- and fan-friendly business model attracted authors, publishers and other content providers. Today it sells thousands of e-book titles for nearly five hundred publishers including E-Reads. The Pendergasts will continue operating the website for the parent company.

Asked what he thought of the B&N/Fictionwise marriage, one executive pronounced it “Electrifying! It changes everything.”

Richard Curtis