Online retail giant Amazon.com and bookselling giant Barnes & Noble are fighting for the devotion of digital book lovers with bargain-priced versions of their popular electronic readers.
Barnes & Noble yesterday unveiled a lean new Simple Touch Reader boasting a touch screen and a months-long battery life. The Simple Touch Reader featuring a six-inch, black-and-white touch screen was available for order online at nook.com and was to begin shipping on June 10.
Within hours of the Nook announcement, Amazon released a cheaper version of its Kindle 3G e-reader with the price subsidised by on-screen ads. Kindle 3G with Special Offers was intended to build on the success of a Wi-Fi only model that has become the hottest-selling Amazon e-reader in the five weeks since it was made available with a $114 price tag.
Electronic readers with 3G capabilities can download digital content from anywhere a signal is available, the same way smartphones connect to online data, instead of relying on Internet connections at Wi-Fi hot spots.
The new Nook and the original Kindle with Special Offers feature Wi-Fi connections to get digital material. The Nook and Kindle were tailored for readers and not touted as challenges to tablet computers such as iPads, which are platforms for web browsing, games, videos and more as well as electronic books.
Barnes & Noble claimed to have captured 25% of the digital book market since launching the first Nook model about 18 months ago. The company calls itself the world's largest bookseller, with 705 bookstores in 50 states.
But the book business has been hammered by a shift to electronic books as well as Internet sales. Borders, the second-largest US bookstore chain, filed for bankruptcy in February, and is still undergoing restructuring.
Amazon said it was selling 105 Kindle e-books for every 100 print books, hardcover and paperback combined since April 1. The company said it had sold more than three times as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same time last year.
Amazon began selling print books in July 1995 and introduced the Kindle in November 2007. The US Kindle store offers more than 950,000 books, including 109 of the 111 New York Times best sellers. Amazon does not release sales figures for the Kindle e-reader.
