Quoted from PlasticLogic.com – Barnes & Noble Launches Worlds Largest eBookstore:

“Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, announced today the launch of the Barnes & Noble eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks), the world’s largest eBookstore, on Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), enabling customers to buy eBooks and read them on a wide range of platforms, including the iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry® smartphones, as well as most Windows® and Mac® laptops or full-sized desktop computers. In addition, Barnes & Noble announced that it will be the exclusive eBookstore provider on the forthcoming and much anticipated Plastic Logic eReader device.”

Click here to read the full press release…

Amazon clearly has an advantage currently in the educational realm. While B&N has 700,000+ books with the expectation of over a million within a year, the issue is that they don’t have any eTextbooks or educational section yet. Amazon already has a deal with major educational publishers (Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, etc…) to provide their traditional textbook in an eTextbook format on the Kindle.

So how does this impact the educational community? Well if you remember, Barnes & Noble (B&N) is in bed with many of the major universities in the United States, so that could mean they will have an easier time getting their eTextbooks into the classroom. So if B&N could strike a similar deal with the traditional textbook publishers they may have an advantage, but for now B&N can’t complete in the educational world yet.

But if you are looking for a new eBook platform, the smartest thing Barnes & Noble is doing is the ubiquitous platform launch – simply meaning, they are releasing across many various platform: iPhone, iPod Touch, computers (both Windows and Macs), and Plastic Logic eReader (coming in the future).

The real question to me is… Does Barnes & Noble want a piece of the $5.4 billion textbook industry? IF they do, they already have the inside track to the major universities.