In your face, Amazon: Barnes & Noble joins battle for e-book market

Barnes & Noble (BKS), the nation's largest brick-and-mortar bookstore chain, announced yesterday that is has purchased the second- largest distributor, of e-books, Fictionwise, for $15 .7 million in cash.

The acquisition brings to Barnes & Noble a catalog of over 60,000 titles formatted for reading on a variety of platforms, including PCs, the Blackberry, Sony eReader, and Amazon's Kindle.