Teleread is reporting on this story as well.
Quote:
And so if the consumer has one of the devices eReader supports that are not iPhone, Blackberry, Windows, or Mac—to be precise, this includes Android, PalmOS, old Windows CE, new Windows Mobile, Symbian, and OQO—he is basically out of luck, and has no way of knowing this until he’s already sunk the cash.
There is nothing on Barnes & Noble’s e-book page—or even on their e-book FAQ—to give any suggestion that Barnes & Noble’s application is not still using the same format as plain-vanilla eReader. This is the closest their FAQ comes:
What is the Barnes & Noble eReader?
The Barnes & Noble eReader is an application used to read Barnes & Noble eBooks on your iPhone, Blackberry, Windows PC or Mac. Without it, you will not be able to read Barnes & Noble eBooks. Our eBooks are encrypted to protect the authors’ work. Thus, other eBook Readers will not work with Barnes & Noble eBooks. The Barnes & Noble eReader can display styled text (italicized, underlined, etc.) and formatting as well as perform functions not found on other eBook readers. The Barnes & Noble eReader is FREE and is supported on multiple devices.
To be fair, it again mentions only those four platforms. But it still uses the term eReader—and to make matters worse, it is now clearly using it as a proper-noun application name. Because when Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise so they could create their own reader app to go head-to-head with Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone, they did not bother to rename it.
Thus, there is a Barnes & Noble eReader, which works only for the four platforms above, and there is a Fictionwise eReader, which is the original. So again: “Hey, I’ve got eReader—I’m covered, right?” Wrong.
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