A year ago, it wasn’t even clear that traditional book retailer Barnes & Noble had an e-book plan. But, over the past few months, the company has picked up several small e-book companies, and on Monday it announced the end results of its efforts: dedicated readers for phone and desktop platforms, an exclusive deal with an upcoming portable reader, and a massive library of over 700,000 books, most of them free. Despite the impressive numbers, B&N is still playing catch up with Amazon in a number of areas.

In the library department, B&N’s 700,000 books dwarfs Amazon’s capacity, which the company claims includes over 300,000 works (minus two from George Orwell). But all of Amazon’s offerings are commercially-produced works that are still in print. B&N has gotten to its figure by partnering with Google, gaining access to out-of-copyright works that have been scanned as part of the Google Book Search service. On the plus side, these are available for free; readers who have been itching to catch up on the classics will love this service. On the downside, B&N may end up paying for a lot of bandwidth to satisfy a user base that won’t be paying them anything.

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