How many times have we urged the e-book industry to smarten up and heed the wise maxim attributed to King Gillette, inventor of disposable razor blades: “Give away the razor and sell them the blades.” We simply can’t think of a strategy better designed to advance consumer acceptance of e-books.

Well, someone finally listened to us. Mere days after launching its 700,000 title e-bookstore, which it claims is the world’s largest, Barnes & Noble is now offering e-book reading software free. B&N is even throwing in a starter set of six titles. To take advantage of the offer, click on this BN.com ad.

We don’t have all the specs, but presumably the B&N software will be compatible with most e-reading devices, especially the forthcoming Plastic Logic NoName Whatsit (see our gift offer for best name suggestion), but not with Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s eReader.

RC

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

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.