Beaming books to a device near you?

While the book seller's online subsidiary, Barnes & Noble.com, continues to slug it out with online retailer Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble simultaneously is prepping for changes it will make in its physical bookstores in order to keep pace with technology.

In the course of his remarks at Microsoft's e-book reader launch in New York on Tuesday, Barnes & Noble.com (bnbn) Vice Chairman Steve Riggio offered up some hints of where the company's bookstores are headed.

Riggio predicted that Barnes & Noble stores will remain hubs for local coffee klatches and book group meetings from Missoula, Mont., to Seattle. But while customers sip their Starbucks, they also may be waiting for a bookstore clerk to download the latest e-book onto their Pocket PC-based handheld or Rocket eBook reader -- or maybe even onto some kind of Barnes & Nobel-branded device.

"You could see B&N-branded (handheld) devices by next year," Riggio told attendees at Microsoft's press conference. "You will see a situation where you can have books beamed onto your device at the store."

Barnes & Noble also foresees the ability of its stores to offer users a far broader range of titles, as e-publishing makes it more profitable for publishing companies to release books that aren't guaranteed best-sellers, he said.

And forget about titles going out of print. E-books will allow publishers and bookstores to offer back-listed publications, either in e-book-form or in instantly printed download form.

"More books go out of print each year than are published," Riggio noted. "Now things like 75 years' worth of Harper's articles can all be brought back."

Barnes & Noble.com unveiled on Tuesday the opening of its eBook Store site, from which users can download e-books in three formats: Microsoft Reader, Rocket eBook and Glassbook.

The site offers readers 100 free titles, with authors ranging from Willa Cather to Jonathan Swift. Other e-book titles currently run about 20 percent to 30 percent below the list price of their print counterparts.

But instead of considering e-books as the nail in the coffin of print books or bookstores, publishers and distributors should consider them as complements -- like books on tape have become to print books, Riggio said.

E-books are "not about killing sales of print books," Riggio added. Instead, by allowing readers to preview first chapters of forthcoming novels, e-books can "help stimulate sales of print books."

Riggio talked up new marketing possibilities, such as offering customers bundles of e-books and print books.

New marketing schemes aren't the only wild card. The very concept of what constitutes a book will be changing, agreed Barnes & Noble and other publishing officials at Microsoft's Reader launch.

"The basic concept of 'book' is changing," said Dick Brass, Microsoft's vice president for technology development. "Moby Dick doesn't benefit from the addition of 'whale song.'

"But cookbooks could benefit from videos, and textbooks from computer-based training. The nature of books themselves will become more interesting."