Barnes & Noble expected to unveil e-reader

NEW YORK — Barnes & Noble Inc. Inc. is expected to unveil an electronic-book reader Tuesday to compete with Amazon.com’s Kindle in the still-small arena where some see bookselling’s future heading.

The New York Times reported that the wireless reader will be called the “Nook” and sell for $259 — the same as the recently reduced Kindle. The newspaper cited an ad to run in its book review section Sunday.

The reader will offer a color touch screen, according to the Times, and there was speculation in blogs that it will let users loan e-books to other people.

Barnes & Noble executives did not return calls for comment Tuesday.

The largest U.S. book store chain is only the latest company to enter the e-reader market, which Kindle has dominated since its 2007 launch. Sony has sold e-readers since 2006 and plans to launch a new version with a touch screen and wireless downloading capability via AT&T in December. Smaller companies IREX Technologies Inc. and Plastic Logic Ltd. also plan to offer e-readers soon.

So far, e-readership is small.

“Only 8 percent of the U.S. adult population bought one e-book in 2008,” and most read them on PCs, said Michael Norris, senior analyst at research firm Simba Information. “So it’s a device that is extremely important to everyone except 92 percent of American adults.”

Still, the niche is growing fast in an industry that is slumping. Forrester Research predicts 3 million e-readers will sell in the U.S. in 2009, and twice as many in 2010.

Sales have been falling for years at Barnes & Noble and other brick-and-mortar booksellers — mainly chief rival Borders Inc., which sells Sony e-readers in some stores — as shoppers turn to online and discount booksellers. The recession also led consumers to slash their spending on discretionary items like books and music.

Barnes & Noble hopes the e-reader and the company’s new e-bookstore, launched in July, will boost sales. The e-bookstore, which sells versions of books to read on smart phones and other mobile devices and most personal computers, offers 700,000 books, including the more than half-million offered free by Google Inc. It plans to offer up to 1 million within a year, as well as magazines and newspapers.

Amazon.com meanwhile offers about 350,000 books for the Kindle, and Sony offers about 600,000, including Google’s free titles.

When Barnes & Noble launched its e-bookstore, it was to be the exclusive provider of books for a reader from Plastic Logic to be released in 2010. It was not clear Tuesday afternoon whether Plastic Logic makes the e-book soon to be announced.

For Barnes & Noble and Amazon, e-book readers may be customer retention tools more than anything else because owners must buy proprietary versions of books to use the devices. And Barnes & Noble has the advantage that it can feature its e-reader in its stores, said Norris.

“If you buy something from Amazon, you can’t touch it first,” he said. “Barnes & Noble presumably will have big showcases for these in all of its superstores…. Barnes & Noble, knowing full well that Amazon isn’t as big in e-books as it wants people to think, is hoping that the fact they can get consumers to hold a reasonably priced e-book device in their hand … will target their device to the right people.”