Barnes amp; Noble muscles Kindle with e-book buy
Barnes & Noble is stumping $15.7m to buy the indie e-book seller Fictionwise.com as part of the mega-chain's second attempt to sell digital books online.
The cash acquisition comes just days after Amazon extended its Kindle e-book store to support the iPhone and iPod Touch for US customers. Amazon may be making small concessions towards making its digital bookstore available outside the Kindle's despotic proprietary format, but B&N appears to sensibly be taking the open format route to compete against its established rival.
Fictionwise currently sells its e-book in a variety of formats to support most of the major e-book readers and mobile devices, so long as the book publishers allow it. The site's co-founder Scott Pendergrast told the e-tome blog TeleRead he was only willing to sell to a vendor who shared is open format philosophy — and hopefully that vision can survive the throes of a B&N acquisition.
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