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Barnes & Noble is aiming to "close the discovery gap" with content "aggressively" acquired and licensed from publishers across the world and with channels backed by the knowledge of local booksellers and publishers.
At a session at Publishers Launch Frankfurt, executives from Barnes & Noble, speaking ahead of the UK launch of its devices later this month, said that it would work with its UK retailer partners and local publishers to inform its content offer, but said that its catalogue was already competitive to that offered by local rivals.
"We are content-centric, we'll close the discovery gap for consumers. We'll use the knowledge from booksellers and content providers, and add that to machine knowledge, so that people can get to the content that excites them more quickly," said vice-president of e-books at Barnes & Noble Jim Hilt.
Emphasising B&N's commitment to international expansion, the executives said that content would be sold wherever it had devices in the local marketplace, and on the Windows 8 platform (via its strategic partnership with Microsoft) where it did not. "We are motivated to sell content, on a Nook, or wherever," said Theresa Horner, vice-president of digital content at Barnes & Noble. "I might sound like Dr Zeus, but we will sell it here, we will sell it there."
Horner also stressed the need to sign up pubishers to the platform, wherever they were in the world, as a way of growing its own device sales. "It is a global business, and we need content from every publisher in every language in every market we are in, so as to have as few reasons not to buy the device as possible."
Horner said the company was motivated to work with publishers to get at that content, with the investment put in by Microsoft likely to help with that content acquisition. "We are going to help publishers bring their content to customers, and if that means helping publishers digitize we'll do that. We have been very aggressive about signing agreements, and very aggressive about shaking that content from the tree."