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It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Barnes and Noble has set their sites on being a hip player in the ebook game.  The company is announcing new products to get their books on more devices and is even partnering with a Kindle competitor all in hopes of grabbing market share.  Their attack looks to be two pronged.

The first prong is the feature of reading your books on the device or your choosing.  The company supports iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and computers running OSs from Mac and PC.  The company launched the iPhone application, B&N Bookstore, yesterday after purchasing FictionWise back in March for its storefront application.  The company has stated they plan on 700,000 titles at launch, including free books in a partnership with Google.

The second prong is a partnership with Plastic Logic that the company announced yesterday.  Plastic Logic has an ebook Reader under development that will feed from the Barnes and Noble store.  Pricing has yet to be reported yet, but it is expected to be well under what the Kindle sells for today (even after the Kindle pricing slides).  If the Kindle has defined a market and take the top dollar crowd, Barnes and Noble hopes to come in and scoop up the lower dollar/higher volume market segment.

Competition will drive this market forward, making these ebook devices more and more useful.  It can’t be too far in the product evolution that a browser gets added along with multimedia playback capabilities.  It is going to be an interesting ride.

Read: [ZDNet] and [PCMag]