Barnes & Noble has been on the iPhone forever, as has Amazon and other ebook readers, retailers, publishers, etc.  I’m an avid reader of electronic books and have been since around 2001, when it became practical to be one.  In that time, I’ve read a considerable number of titles, most of them purchased from FictionWise, which is “A Barnes & Noble” company.

A good portion of these titles I read on an old Pocket PC and when I ditched that in favor of an iPod Touch, FictionWise automatically and instantly transferred the titles from the more enlightened publishers into it.  I guess you could say that it really was like magic, borrowing on Steve Jobs’ description for the iPad.  I just downloaded this free piece of software on my brand new iPod and presto!  Tens of books I had purchased previously came pouring into it. (Considering that they take up almost no space you can truly carry a library in your pocket.)

There are several book readers available for the iPhone and that includes at least one from Barnes & Noble (and there might actually be two of them) two from Amazon.  There is Amazon Kindle for iPhone and there is Stanza.  Stanza is developed by Lexcycle, a company that was acquired by Amazon in April 2009 and that is arguably the best eReader application available for the iPhone and iPod.

So, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that Barnes & Noble will support the iPad with a specific application.  They are in the business of selling books.  If they can sell more books, to more people, so much the better.  The fact that they provide their clients with options for reading on their brand device (the Nook), on the iPhone, the iPad, on a PC or a Mac just makes them stand out against other retailers which impose more strict limits on where you can read your books.  The name Apple might come to mind here, but Apple has shown itself to be way smarter than that in the music business and it might yet surprise many in the book business too.

It’s great to know that B&N is moving to be an early player in the iPad space and I hope that Amazon, Lexcycle, Kobo and all the others are right on their heels…

*Published originally at iPad Watcher

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I strongly recommend this interview to everyone interested on ebooks.

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Amazon took the Kindle to the world, with international shipping.  Sony introduced new models of its Sony Reader with more size, feature and pricing options. The new Pocket and Touch editions are speacially interesting as they add both a lower price and touch-enabled options.

This year should be much, much better.  With a wider range of readers and hopefully a wider range of prices from which to choose from, we should see a lot more people starting to get their toes wet with eBooks.

While I don’t use a dedicated reader, but my iPod, I find that a lot of people reject this idea out hand because of the size of the screen.  Just recently as I started to explain to a friend that just because the screen was small it didn’t mean the type had to be small, he cut me off dismissively as if to say “Hey, you are a fanatic, its obvious that the text is too small, so stop bothering me with it”.    I never cease to amaze my self how people manage to delude themselves that whatever they haven’t tried or don’t feel like experimenting must be bad, regardless of what they hear. For some of these people, even a 15 inch screen will still not be good enough because they will tell you that it doesn’t feel like a book.

The Net is simply buzzing with the rumors that Apple will introduce a new device this month which might have the reading of electronic publications as one of its features.  To tell the truth, while I think that Apple might just  want to add this business to their iTunes offerings, they don’t even have to do that in order to shake the eBook world.  If the rumored Apple Tablet device is capable of running iPhoneOS applications or if it is a simple process to update the iPhone applications to run on it, the applications for eBook reading on iPhone will be more than enough to make this device almost irresistible to eBook lovers.

Imagine a reader with a full color screen capable of displaying anything you’ve purchased over the past years plus full color PDF documents.  Just that is more than enough to make most users of ebook readers salivate. If you add in the ability to listen to audiobooks, browse the Web, do email, use Twitter, access Facebook, LinkedIn, listen to your music and watch movies…  Depending on how much such a device costs, things could get ugly for reader manufacturers.

While all this is still speculation, it seems pretty clear to me that interest in ebooks will continue to grow.  If we will see a regular organic growth pattern or an explosive one is still to be seen.  If Apple joins the game, I’ll put my money on explosive.  What do you think?

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