paidContent - B&N's E-Book Store: Details From Conference Call
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
The news is here. Below are notes from the conference call announcing the deal. William Lynch, president of BN.com, was the exec on the call:
—First entered into the e-book market in 2001, but it didn’t work as the market was too early.
—The e-book doesn’t work with Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Kindle and Sony Reader. They will add more devices for support in the next month.
—Currently e-books are excluded from its usual B&N loyalty program, but will consider it.
—Plastic Logic: the deal is only about an e-book store from BN. No comment on whether BN will have a distribution deal with the company.
—The 700K books number includes the Google open-domain books.
—Won’t allow printing of the e-books, but that’s because of industry-wide copyright requirements rather than a BN issue.
—The book format: the industry standard is ePub, and that’s what they will support.
—Focused on the U.S. market. Nothing on international yet.
By Rafat Ali