Borders builds on its e-book strategy in exclusive deal with Sony.
Taking aim at Amazon.com and its Kindle electronic book reader, Borders Group Inc. will offer Sony’s new PRS-700 e-book reader in most of its 520 superstores in time for this year’s holiday shopping season as well as in-store downloads of e-books. In addition, Sony is redesigning the Borders-Sony co-branded e-book site this month with new merchandising and a streamlined checkout.
"E-books are a part of our business now and will be a part of our future as a bookseller," says Borders CEO George Jones. Borders sells the Sony e-book readers in “eBook Store from Sony” sections of Borders stores. After customers responded positively to the e-book sections during a pilot, Borders decided to roll them out in nearly all of its 520 large-format stores, a spokeswoman says.
Borders and Sony are competing directly against Amazon.com Inc., which sells its own Kindle e-book reader and about 140,000 e-book titles. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Borders, which operated its e-commerce through Amazon.com until early this year, is not included in the Top 500 Guide, which is based on 2007 web sales.
Sony and Borders also operate a co-branded web site, ebooks.borders.com, which is linked directly from the e-books tab on the Borders.com home page. The e-books site allows shoppers to download Sony’s free e-book library software, which enables shoppers to browse, download and purchase e-book content.
The site redesign will offer more prominent book cover art to provide for a more visual shopping experience combined with improved search and navigation and a streamlined checkout process.
Borders is also planning to allow shoppers to download e-book content from in-store kiosks with access to Borders.com. Each Borders store has about five kiosks that are currently used for tasks such as locating a book in the store.
Borders says it will also offer e-book downloads in its digital centers in 13 Borders concept stores and eight regular stores. The digital centers already support downloads of audio books and music files.
The in-store digital centers, which cover about 400 square feet of floor space, also include co-branded sections with such partners as Lulu.com for custom book printing and Shutterfly.com for managing digital photography.
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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor
PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor
