Barnes & Noble acquires e-book seller

Updated at 8:20 a.m. PST with comment from Barnes & Noble.

Barnes & Noble has acquired e-book seller Fictionwise.com for $15.7 million, as it makes another attempt at running an e-book store.

The cash deal, announced Thursday, is part of Barnes & Noble's plans to launch its own e-book store later this year, despite its lack of success with a previous attempt years ago.

Back in 2000, Barnes & Noble teamed up with Microsoft to launch an e-book store with the help of Microsoft Reader software. But three years after its launch and investing at least $20 million into the project, Barnes & Noble discontinued sales of e-books.

Although the company did not disclose the reasons for halting its e-book store efforts, a Nielsen/NetRatings analyst speculated at the time that sales had been minimal.

Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating said Friday that the time wasn't right earlier this decade.

"Consumers were not as quick to embrace the technology, the pricing set by the publishers, or the reading devices," Keating said of the previous effort. "We did have growth in our e-book sales, but the growth was not significant enough to support the business at the time."

Apparently, however, consumer tastes and the technology have advanced enough over the past six years to give it another shot.

"The market has changed since then, and we see this as a growth area," Keating said.

Last month, archrival Amazon.com . And earlier this week, Amazon unveiled its Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Fictionwise, which Barnes & Noble will run as a separate business unit, offers its own eReader app for smartphones, other handheld devices, desktop computers, and laptops. Likewise, competitor Lexcycle has its Stanza app for e-book reading.

While consumer interest in e-books has increased over the years, they have yet to attract a mainstream market. Analysts attribute price as the major barrier to the adoption of e-books.

[egadreader]

The fact that Plastic Logic is partnering with Fictionwise as well to run its econtent store for when it releases its eReader, supposedly in 2010, may also have an impact on this, though it could be totally independent as well.

Fictionwise has always understood that people hate the way DRM has been implemented on most e-books, and have emphasized their multi-format non-DRMed books -- and more recently the "social DRM" used in eReader after they bought the rights to it. I can only hope their vision survives for a while in the B&N universe.

[Maarek Stele]

This will allow B&N to keep older books on their virtual shelf w/ unlimited space. Also users will be able to load them into their iCrap.. I mean iPhones and other smartphones w/ e-reader software loaded.

[davehong]

This is definitely a good partnership for both BN and Fictionwise - looking forward to what the future will bring!

[DougInKY]

As a long time user of eReader and Fictionwise I am a little concerned about this purchase. I hope that Barnes and Noble doesn't try this and abandon this as they did the last time they tried so support the ebook community. It would be tragic to loose the companies that basically founded the ebook trade.