Barnes & Noble E-book Reader About Control

There's a growing rumor that Barnes & Noble will announce its own e-book reader device on October 20. But if true, the company would be making a mistake.

Clearly the impetus to create and sell an electronics device is a knee-jerk reaction to Amazon's relative success with the Kindle, remembering that 600 or 700 thousand units over a few years is a drop in the bucket in the consumer electronics world, where an Apple can sell multiple million iPhones in a quarter. But e-books aren't just about selling a new media. They're about controlling the publishing business. Own the format and the device and you own the industry. At least, that is the approach Amazon has taken.

But it has two fallacies that Barnes & Noble seems ready to accept. No one company can satisfy all customers, and any product that doesn't do business in a way consumers will accept is doomed to fail. And no one company can maintain the entire weight of what an industry has to deliver. Even in a slump, the U.S. book publishing market alone is in the tens of billions of dollars in size. It's a complex industry with an established distribution model, and people don't change their habits that quickly. Concentrating on having proprietary e-book readers when there are multiple large manufacturers, who know how to sell consumer electronics, that are marketing devices seems like a waste of time. Better that Barnes & Nobel showcase their products, rather than becoming a competitor, and build ways to easily merchandise e-books both in stores and on the web.