Barnes & Noble Buys an E-Book Retailer

Barnes & Noble, which has not recently sold e-books on its Web site, bn.com, paid $15.7 million in cash for Fictionwise.

“The market hasn’t been that developed to date,” said William J. Lynch, president of bn.com. “We think it’s a big growth area going forward.”

Most publishers say that e-books are only about 1 percent of total book sales. But e-book sales more than tripled last year at a time when overall book sales were flat or falling. According to a survey by Codex Group, a book marketing research company, 3 percent of book sales from mid-December to mid-January were in digital form.