ReadWriteWeb

When Barnes & Noble launched its eBook store, it immediately attracted a lot of potential customers. According to Compete's Dillon McGovern, more than four times as many people visited the eBook section on B&N's website than the Amazon Kindle store during the first week after the launch in July. After just about a month, though, these numbers returned to normality and today Amazon once again leads the pack by a very wide margin. While B&N was able to attract a lot of interest in its new eBook offerings, it was clearly hurt by the fact that it didn't offer users a hardware eReader yet.

Barnes & Noble, the beleaguered online bookstore, opened its eBook store yesterday. That, by itself would be a major news story, but B&N also announced that it has partnered with Plastic Logic, which is expected to release a highly anticipated Kindle competitor soon. For now, eBooks bought through B&N can be read on PCs and Macs, as well as on iPhones and Blackberries. While iPhone and Blackberry apps are nice, though, no eBook vendor can really compete with Amazon without a good hardware eReader that is integrated closely with an eBook store. Given that B&N seems to have all of the necessary pieces in place, however, we think that the the company can indeed challenge Amazon, especially given that it offers a larger selection of books and plans to offer a device that is more open than Amazon's Kindle.

It's tempting to give Apple's iPhone credit for the birth of touch-based computing, but it was not the first touchscreen user interface - nor is it the only one in existence today. Long before the iPhone, touchscreen LCDs were common, as were touch smartphones from Palm, Sony Ericsson, HTC, and others. In addition, back in 2001 - long before the iPhone launch - Microsoft began work on Microsoft Surface, a touchscreen tabletop computer. Yet it was the iPhone's multi-touch capabilities along with its stellar design that really got the ball rolling for touch computing. The only question that remains now is what will come next?