Nook for Web gives anyone and everyone with a computer access to B&N’s e-book store, and allows them to read books from their browser – no device or extra downloads necessary. With Nook for Web, readers can sample books for free and purchase full copies without registering or having to log in.

Nook for Web currently works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome on a PC or Mac. Tablet support is not yet available.

Probably the most useful feature the comes with Nook for Web is integration amongst all Nook devices, which means you can start a book on your e0reader and pick up exactly where you left off on your browser.

As a promotion for the launch, Barnes & Noble is giving away six bestselling e-books:

Beginning today, Barnes & Noble is offering six bestselling NOOK Books in their entirety at no charge for readers to try NOOK’s award-winning digital reading experience online. With popular summer titles the entire family will enjoy, customers can visit www.nook.com/NOOKforWeb to browse the list of complimentary titles available, including Map of Bones by James Rollins, Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell, The Vow by Kim Carpenter, The Boxcar Children Summer Special by Gertrude Chandler Warner, Brave by Tennant Redbank and Perfect Island Getaways by Patricia Schultz, instantly read the sample, and then download the entire book for free on any browser now through July 26.

Nook’s biggest competitor, the Kindle, already has its own web reading experience, the Kindle Cloud Reader.

What I see happening is a complementary relationship; it’s not a love-hate issue. You didn’t give up talking on the phone when they came out with text messaging, did you? No, it’s just another medium for communication. You don’t have to take a stand, there’s plenty of room for both mediums to exist.

This next inforgraphic from OnlineUniversities.Com illustrates the relationship in a really powerful way. Interestingly, 73% of American readers prefer e-books for travel. I think that’s a no-brainer. You can fit as many e-books as you want on one device, but you’re limited with carrying around physical copies.

When it come to reading to our children, over 80% preferred a hard copy. Of course, most of us don’t trust young kids with expensive devices, and besides, kids love to hear the same stories over and over again. The hard copy is their version of on-demand.

This is a great infographic, take some time and explore what they came up with:

Brought to you by: OnlineUniversities.com

Before the iPad launched in 2010, Amazon effectively owned the e-book market with its Kindle e-reader. Operating on a wholesale model for pricing, Amazon paid a wholesale price for e-books, then set its own prices for them. Much to the publishers’ frustration, Amazon used books in a way no retailer had done before: as a loss leader. It sold the e-books below wholesale in order to drive sales of the Kindle. Publishers feared that this would create unreasonable expectations among customers, and that it would drive down the cost of hard copy books – especially hardcovers, which are the publishers’ biggest money makers.

While Barnes & Noble tried to elbow its way into the e-book market with its Nook e-reader (which was arguably superior to the Kindle in terms of hardware), it met with little real success, never getting closer than a distant second to the Kindle. When Apple launched the iPad and its iBooks e-reader software, though, it also announced new deals with the five publishers named in the Justice Department’s lawsuit. Under the agency model, it’s the publishers who set the prices of e-books, and the retailer – in this case Apple – gets a 30% cut off the top for every book sold. Once the iPad took off in popularity – to the point that it harmed sales of e-readers like the Kindle and Nook – the publishers were able to force Amazon and Barnes & Noble to enter into the same sort of agency model agreements they had with Apple.

All of this raised major concerns with the Justice Department (and the European Commission), which thought the switch to the agency model smacked of anti-competitive collusion. They finally filed an antitrust suit against all six companies earlier this month. While three of the companies – Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster – reached quick settlements to avoid a costly legal battle, the other three did not. Macmillan, Penguin, and Apple all issued statements insisting they had done nothing wrong. What’s more, they claimed that although the agency model did result in higher e-book prices, it actually fostered competition by breaking Amazon’s stranglehold on the e-book market.

What’s interesting is that they appear to be right. There are a couple of important points to consider. First and foremost, the agency model is certainly not the result of collusion. It wasn’t invented by Apple or the publishers just for e-book pricing. It has existed in other industries for quite some time. What’s more, it’s been in use by Apple for several years: the iOS App Store operates on the exact same pricing model. Developers set the price of their apps, and Apple gets 30% off the top. If a developer sells their app for $0.99, Apple gets 30% ($0.297). If a developer sells their app for $4.99, Apple gets 30% ($1.50). If a developer offers their app for free, Apple gets 30% ($0).

That in and of itself creates a major problem for the Justice Department’s case. Even if the government can prove that the publishers colluded, it will be nearly impossible to prove that Apple did so. All Apple did was offer e-book publishers the same pricing model that it offers app developers. The publishers, in turn, saw a model that offered them a chance to get out from under Amazon’s thumb, and they took it.

Competition is another place where the government will have trouble making its case. As previously noted, Amazon’s pre-iPad grip on the e-book market was strong. While other e-readers and e-book retailers existed, none was able to offer a serious challenge to Amazon and the Kindle. The best challenge was Barnes & Noble, who was never able to do better than a distant second. Since the switch to the agency model, though, the Kindle’s market share has dropped, making room for an increased Barnes & Noble presence, and for the iPad, which is the Kindle’s greatest challenger. The problem that the government faces, then, is that it has to argue that a pricing model that demonstrably increased competition is somehow anti-competitive.

In the meantime, though, things are already starting to change. As Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal points out, Barnes & Noble is already starting to suffer in the wake of the lawsuit. Though the terms of the government’s settlements with three of the five publishers are not known, it’s almost certain that they include a return to the wholesale model, which will allow Amazon to return to using e-books as a loss leader.

The publishing industry is not without its flaws. Indeed, in many ways the rise of e-books has been handled horribly by an industry that is as married to a moribund business model as its counterparts in Hollywood. Nevertheless, it’s looking more and more like the publishers might actually be in the right on this one, and that if e-book readers want a genuinely healthy e-book market, they might have to be willing to pay slightly higher prices for their books.

What do you think? Is the agency model anti-competitive? Do low prices trump a genuinely competitive market? Does the wholesale model risk turning Amazon into the Walmart of the e-book world? Let us know in the comments.

Distributing certain types of e-books like backlist titles via Academic Complete is advantageous in that publishers can participate in ebrary’s new approach to e-book acquisition and distribution. This approach includes working with libraries to leverage Academic Complete subscription usage statistics by discipline to determine where to strategically apply additional budgets to other acquisition models. It also involves streamlining and automating the ordering process through book vendors such as YBP.

Academic Complete was the industry’s first e-book subscription product and has been serving as a foundational collection to thousands of libraries across the globe for almost ten years.

Carole Correa-Morris, Head of Acquisitions at San Jose State University in an ebrary press release issued April 10 said that, “…We have been examining our Academic Complete usage statistics to strategically expand our patron driven acquisition program. By focusing on higher use subjects, we can better determine which titles to add to our consideration pool and only purchase those that are used.”

Kevin Sayar, President and General Manager of ebrary claims that by, “utilizing a variety of models including subscription, publishers can more fully monetize their monographic content, and libraries can affordably acquire the e-books researchers require.”

According to one of ebrary’s PowerPoints, U.S. e-book sales are expected to exceed more than $3 billion by 2015 and they are the fastest growing segment of the publishing industry. By 2015, public libraries are expected to increase their spending on e-books by 296%.

Hopefully these strategies will help public libraries keep up with the shift from print to e-books and save patrons a considerable amount of money.

Here’s the statement, which was given to AllThingsD by Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr:

The DOJ’s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true. The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. Since then customers have benefited from eBooks that are more interactive and engaging. Just as we’ve allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore.

Of the five publishers that were also sued by the DOJ, three have already settled out of court. Shortly after the suit was filed, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster agreed to settle for undisclosed terms. The other two publishers, Macmillan and Penguin, have vowed to fight the suit in court alongside Apple. The CEOs of Macmillan and Penguin issued statements not long after the suit was filed denying any wrongdoing and insisting that the deals they made with Apple actually fostered competition by breaking Amazon’s stranglehold on the e-book market.

Amazon, as you might expect, is immensely pleased with this development. They called the DOJ’s suit and the deals with three of the five publishers “a big win for Kindle owners.”

The Justice Department announced today in a statement that it had reached a settlement with three of the largest book publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster – in the United States. During a press conference, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said, “If approved by the court, this settlement would resolve the Department’s antitrust concerns with these companies, and would require them to grant retailers – such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble – the freedom to reduce the prices of their e-book titles.”

Amazon, as you would imagine, was delighted with the news that it would be free to market e-books at a lower price. “It is a big win for Kindle owners,” the company said in a statement. “We look forward to being allowed to lower prices on more Kindle books.”

Aside from pushing more e-books into the market, the move could also be advantageous for future sales of Kindles. As more and more people continue to use mobile devices as their preferred method for reading digital material, Amazon could be in a position wrest away any market share that Apple managed to capture since the launch of its iPads in 2010.

And while this may not be the best news in the world if you’re a book retailer, lower e-book prices will most likely lead consumers to continue their starry-eyed affection for Amazon.

[Via CNET.]

While Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster have reportedly agreed to settle out of court, Apple, MacMillan, and Penguin apparently mean to contest the suit. A little while ago, Macmillan CEO John Sargent made a post to Macmillan’s news page explaining his company’s refusal to settle the lawsuit.

He begins with the assertion that Macmillan is innocent of any wrongdoing in its adoption of the agency model: “Macmillan did not act illegally. Macmillan did not collude.” In fact, he said, the decision to adopt the agency model was not made in concert with other publishing CEOs, but rather Sargent himself came to the decision “on January 22nd, 2010 a little after 4:00 AM, on an exercise bike in my basement.” He also called it “the loneliest decision I have ever made.”

Sargent also argues that the choice to adopt the agency model was not motivated by a desire for increased profits, but by a desire to preserve competition. The agency model, he says, means that Macmillan makes less money on e-book sales, but that the change was made “to support an open and competitive market for the future.”

He also called the settlement terms the DOJ was demanding “too onerous.” Though Macmillan would have preferred to settle out of court and avoid the costs “in time, distraction, and expense.” These terms, though, “could have allowed Amazon to recover the monopoly position it had been building before our switch to the agency model.”

Sargent noted that Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster had decided to settle, and said that it was “their decision to make.” Macmillan, however, would continue to fight in court because “[i]t is hard to settle a lawsuit when you know you have done no wrong.”

Sargent’s statement closes with a quote from Author’s Guild president Scott Turow, who had the following to say:

The irony of this bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition. This would be tragic for all of us who value books and the culture they support.

What do you think? Is the agency model actually better for competition, or should it be abandoned, at the risk of Amazon gaining a monopoly? Let us know in the comments.

ORIGINAL STORY:

Earlier this morning we brought you news that the U.S. Department of Justice might file suit against Apple and several book publishers for e-book price fixing. Now it looks like that suit has actually been filed.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the DOJ has filed suit against Apple and all five of the publishers listed in the original investigation: Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, MacMillan, and HarperCollins. The suit alleges that the agreements between Apple and the publishers made prior to the launch of the original iPad and iBooks in 2010 constitute price-fixing, in violation of U.S. antitrust laws.

According to the report, three of the five publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster – are seeking to settle the case out of court, while Apple, Penguin, and MacMillan are all preparing to fight the lawsuit. Requests for comment sent to Apple and the five publishers have not yet been answered. Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg says that the settlements could come later today.

The government is seeking to nullify the agreements between Apple and the five publishers that instituted an agency model of e-book sales. Under the agency model, publishers set the price of e-books, and the retailer gets 30% of the price. Under the previous wholesale model, e-books were sold in the same way as physical books: the books are sold to the retailer by the publisher, and the retailer is allowed to set whatever price they choose. This model caused concern for publishers because Amazon was selling e-books at or below wholesale in order to drive sales of their Kindle e-reader, a practice which Barnes & Noble also adopted when they released their own Nook e-reader. The government alleges that by adopting the agency model, Apple and the publishers colluded to raise e-book prices. Once the agency model agreements with Apple were in place, the publishers were able to strong-arm Amazon and Barnes & Noble into similar agreements.

Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Reuters reported last night that while some of the publishers have been engaged in settlement negotiations with the government, Apple has not. Early last month the Justice Department issued warnings to Apple and five major publishing houses – Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, MacMillan, and Harper Collins – that it was investigating them for violations of anti-trust regulations.

When the iPad launched in 2010, Apple announced agreements with several major publishers that completely changed the landscape of e-book sales. Previously, e-books had been sold using the same wholesale model under which physical books are sold: the publisher sells the books to the retailer (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.), and the retailer then sets the price for the books. With the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle reader and the growing popularity of e-books, however, the publishers began to be unhappy with this model. In order to sell units of the Kindle, Amazon was selling many e-books at or below wholesale. Publishers worried that this practice would negatively impact the sales of hard copy e-books – particularly hardcover editions.

Prior to the launch of the iPad, Apple negotiated with the publishers to sell e-books through the iBooks store under an agency model. This model mirrors the pricing model in Apple’s App Store: the e-book prices are set by the publisher, and Apple receives 30% of all sales. While these agreements were extremely unpopular with both consumers and retailers (other than Apple), the publishers were extremely pleased. With Apple – and the immense popularity of the newly released iPad – behind them, the publishers were able to strong-arm Amazon and Barnes and Noble into similar agreements.

These agreements, however, caught the attention of both the U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission. Both organizations worried that the agreements between Apple and the publishers amounted to price fixing and violated antitrust laws. While there has been no word on the progress of the European investigation in some time, it seems that the Justice Department has concluded that antitrust laws were violated.

While the terms of the settlements with the publishers are not known, it is highly likely that they will be required to scrap the agency model and return to the wholesale model for e-books. What that will mean for the publishers’ bottom line is not entirely clear, however it could mean a significant boost in revenue for Amazon and Barnes and Noble, as well as a drop in e-book prices. The DOJ’s lawsuit against Apple will likely pursue a similar outcome. There has also been some speculation that the practice of windowing – releasing an e-book weeks or even months after the hardcover edition comes out – may be a target of the DOJ investigation as well.

What do you think? Does the agency model constitute price fixing? What about e-book windowing? Is the wholesale model fair to publishers? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content comments on the addition of the new service:

“We’re excited to introduce Spanish language storefronts on all Kindles, as well as a dedicated store for our Spanish-speaking customers in the U.S.,”

“We expect our Spanish-speaking customers to enjoy both the newly-added books in Spanish, and the improved shopping and reading experience-including dedicated customer service in Spanish-that we’ve added to eBooks Kindle en Español. And we’re looking forward to continued expansion of our store for Spanish language readers around the world.”

Here’s what eBooks Kindle en Español includes:

* All of the Spanish-language Nielsen best sellers available as eBooks in the United States, and 65 of the top 100 Spanish-language print best sellers from Amazon.com

* The largest representation of Mexican authors, including Jose Emilio Pacheco, Carlos Monsivais and Sergio Pitol

* Kindle Singles in Spanish, including Singles by best-selling authors Kurt Vonnegut and Susan Orlean

* An exclusive selection of Dora the Explorer and Go Diego Go books in Spanish

* Compilations of articles from “El Pais,” including exclusive pieces from Mexican journalists writing about Mexican current affairs

* Subscriptions to 14 leading Latin American newspapers such as El Universal and La Nacion

* Popular English-language books translated into Spanish, such as the Hunger Games series, the Twilight series, “Steve Jobs,” “The Help,” and books by authors Stephen King, Nora Roberts and Joel Osteen

Author Paulo Coelho also comments on the release of the new service:

“As one of the first authors to make my work available digitally, and an author whose entire catalog is available digitally, I’m very excited that my Spanish-speaking audience will now be able to buy my books in the Kindle Store with this improved experience,”

“I believe that many more people will have access to great stories from diverse authors with this improved digital experience, and Kindle readers will also now get to read my new work, ‘El Libro de los Manuales,’ available exclusively in Spanish from the Kindle Store. I am grateful to all of my Hispanic readers in the United States for their ongoing support to my entire canon.”

So as more titles become available the service will grow in popularity. I am surprised to see Amazon waiting so long to deliver this much needed version of the popular Kindle e-books library. Time will tell, but I think this is going to be a real money maker for Amazon.