Today William Lynch, president of BN.Com, went on Morning Joe, the popular MSNBC television show, to discuss the new BN.com e-book initiative. He also demonstrated on his iPhone how fast anyone can access the site, seek and select a title, order and download it. He did it in front of a camera in about 30 seconds. And what was the book? Lynch cannily chose Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough’s own recently published book Last Best Hope. When Scarborough asked if he should buy a Kindle, Lynch replied that the BN store can be accessed by most other devices and especially the forthcoming Plastic Logic (No-Name) reader. However, the one device they don’t seem to support is Amazon’s Kindle.

You can watch William Lynch’s interview here at MSNBC.

Despite his praise for Plastic Logic, Lynch seemed to make a glaring factual error unless he knows something no one else does: he described the new Plastic Logic display arriving in Q1 2010 as “plastic roll-up,” which according to Plastic Logic is not going to be the case (Plastic Logic announces upcoming reader device – July 22, NY Times). The yet unnamed device will be larger than the Kindle DX, to attract more business users for professional documents, and have integrated 3G and Wi-Fi compatibility thanks to an agreement with AT&T.

Is BN.com going to win customers back from Amazon? They’ll have a fighting chance now that they are looking to streamline the purchasing steps standing between readers and new e-books.

The new BN.com’s “Buy Now (read in seconds)” button in their e-book section is suspiciously like Amazon’s “One-Click Buy It Now” button, which is a notoriously protected feature that Jeff Bezos sought to patent and license. Currently, Kindle customers only need to press one button at Amazon’s website to have the book purchased and immediately accessible to their Kindle or iPhone. Now BN.com customers will have a similar option. But one big difference between the two retailers is that the new BN.com “Buy Now” button is presently only for ebooks, not print books. If the book is going to be delivered by mail, you’d think an extra click or two won’t make a difference, but this is where Amazon innovated their impressive market share by making things easier for the customer. It’s good to see BN.com making a real effort to catch up in more ways than one.

RC and MG