Marking a drift from its physical bookshelves, brick-and-mortar book retailer Barnes & Noble's launched an e-book virtual warehouse on Monday - the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, its online bookstore; following it up with new e-book reading application for PCs and mobile devices.

Giving ominous competition to Amazon and its e-reader Kindle, B&N is commencing its online venture with a bestsellers and classics collection, comprising 700,000 titles; most of them priced $9.99 - the amount Amazon charges for its new e-books! By next year, B&N would increase the number of titles to over one million titles!

Also directing users to free copies of works in the public domain from Google Books, B&N would give first-time users an access to free ebooks - including Merriam- Webster's Pocket Dictionary; Sense and Sensibility; Little Women; Pride and Prejudice, and others.

B&N - which bought ebook vendor FictionWise in March - intends teaming up with Plastic Logic for its forthcoming e-reader device, scheduled to be launched 2010. The retailer is aiming at making ebooks available to "any platform" - including the iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, and computers with Windows OS or Mac OS X.

Commenting on the extensive expanse that B&N is aiming for, William Lynch, president of barnesandnoble. com, said: "Readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time!"