A New Challenger Appears: Borders Enters the E-book Market

The e-book market is certainly heating up quite a bit.  We’ve seen prices drop from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Sony, the rise of new mobile apps, new devices, and now another company is joining the fray.  The second largest retail book store, Borders, is finally bringing itself into the expanding market.

Borders has been selling e-book readers for a few months now, both the Kobo Reader and the Aluratek Reader which cost $150 and $120, respectively.  The chain has also had iOS apps out for a few weeks now, and along with the e-bookstore is launching apps for Android and BlackBerry devices. {Mashable}

Like Borders’ higher-end e-book reader, the e-bookstore is powered by Kobo.  The store already has 1.5 million books.  That puts it right int he middle of Barnes & Noble, which only has 1 million books available, and smaller than Amazon which boasts more free e-books (1.8 million) than either have in total.  Apple, on the other hand, advertises “tens of thousands” of books in the iBookstore (which excludes popular books like “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” by Steig Larsson).

Borders hopes to gain 17 percent of the e-book market by July 2011.  That might be possible given that Barnes & Noble was able to get 20 percent of the market in about a year’s time.  Borders is late to the game, however, with readers that look rather pricey given their feature set compared to the recent price slashing that has happened among their peers in the market.  Like Barnes & Noble, Borders does have a retail store to help promote the e-book readers, though the fact that the Kindle is available in Target stores now could put a damper on that.