IDPF Conference at BEA 2011

There were lots of impressive speeches, even if some were somewhat technical. (my head is whirling with ARIA roles). The one that grabbed my fantasy the most was from Barnes and Noble's Theresa Horner. She showed how B&N are integrating e and bricks-and-mortar and the Nook to drive sales. To give two examples: take your Nook into the bookstore and offers will appear on your screen, and, with some limitations, you can start reading any ebook available for the Nook. The website and the ereader is being use to drive custom into the store and towards p-books and the bricks-and-mortar shops are being used to drive ebook sales. Nice integration.

And then I got back to my hotel room and read in this morning's paper that noted contrarian investor John Malone's Liberty Media has made a bid for all shares not held by B&N chairman Leonard Riggio. Janney Capital Markets analyst David Strasser is reported to say that B&N is the undisputed No. 2 player in the e-book industry with some 28% or so share of the market. (We are not seeing that in Oz as B&N ain't there.) With Amazon saying it has some 70% of the ebook market it doesn't leave much for Kobo — and it will be interesting to see what happens to Google and Apple's shares.