The last big news we heard about BN.com was in the fall of 2003:

“In a surprise move, Barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN) has stopped selling eBooks. The online retailer is in the process of e-mailing its affiliates to let them know of the program’s demise this week.”

That was written by a blogger, Rick Aristotle Munarriz, who like so many e-pioneers was sent reeling by B&N’s pullout from a nascent e-book industry.

“With Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) as BN.com’s majority stakeholder,” Munarriz continued, “one has to wonder if the company is missing the high-margin potential of the medium or if the sales just aren’t there. Or, for the budding conspiracy theorists out there, is BN.com simply refusing to promote a niche where its parent company can’t partake or one that promotes a level playing field in an arena where publishing house suppliers are used to the advantages of size? eBook fans would like some answers. Unlike its warehouse-shipped forefathers, an immediate answer would be welcome.”

Well, maybe not immediately, exactly, but six years later Mr. Munarriz has his answer. BN.com is being resurrected, and this time we think it will be here to stay. Four months ago the world’s largest print-book chain acquired Fictionwise, the world’s largest e-book retailer in a $15.7 million deal we declared to be a game-changer. “With this single stroke,” we wrote, “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.”

Barnes & Noble is already billing itself as twice as big as Amazon (700,000 titles vs. 330,000). Of course, most of BN.com’s title list will consist of public domain books. Motoko Rich, reporting on the deal in the New York Times, points out that “More than 500,000 of the books now offered electronically on BN.com can be downloaded free, through an agreement with Google to provide electronic versions of public domain books that Google has scanned from university libraries… Currently, Google’s public domain books cannot be read on a Kindle.”

So most of BN.com’s books will be public domain – big deal! 700,000 books is the kind of scaled-up inventory that industry old-timers (circa 1998) said had to be achieved before the chain reaction became self-sustaining. And don’t forget that public domain is the very kind of inducement that Freemongers have been advocating to stimulate e-books over the tipping point. The interaction of all those downloadables with the 1.2 million hard copies offered by Barnes & Noble’s website is as tipping-pointy as you can get. (By the way, right now if you click on bn.com you get flipped to barnesandnoble.com, but in time BN.com will be a discrete e-book website.)

There are lots of issues to be worked out before launch such as pricing and compatibility with various devices. As to the latter, right now the company is trying to be device-agnostic but there’s lots of talk about it teaming up with the as-yet unnamed (will it EVER be named?) Plastic Logic reading device scheduled for release in 2010. Whether that gadget would become B&N’s Kindle, we don’t know, but we’re not sure why anyone would want to close out any e-readers, especially Sony and Apple. Publishers Lunch pundit Michael Cader says “BN said they have made ‘a strategic commerce and content partnership with Plastic Logic’ and ‘will power the eBookstore for the Plastic Logic eReader device.’” Cader adds that “In further explanations BN said they will be the exclusive vendor of ebooks for Plastic Logic.”

E-book aggregators are weaving garlands to strew on BN.com when it opens for business.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.