Barnes & Noble.com To Buy a 20% Stake In Electronic Publisher
NEW YORK -- Barnes & Noble.com Inc. is paying about $20 million for a 20% stake in MightyWords Corp., which offers digital versions of books and texts by both wellknown and unknown authors.</br></br>MightyWords is being shed by Fatbrain.com Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif., online retailer of technical books. Under terms, Barnes & Noble.com will begin offering MightyWords' content on its site.</br></br>Technical and educational books have provided a market for electronic publishers for several years. But e-publishing burst out to a wider audience earlier this year when Viacom Inc.'s Simon & Schuster Inc. published a novella by Stephen King exclusively on the Internet.</br></br>MightyWords' writing -- which can be downloaded to a personal computer and then printed onto paper -- includes some romance and fiction by authors including Toni Morrison and Arthur C. Clarke. But much of its subject matter focuses on technical subjects such as business or computing.</br></br>Fatbrain announced it would shed MightyWords in March, just about the time the stock market soured on Internet investments. Instead of taking the company public, Fatbrain turned to private investors. MightyWords' deal with Barnes & Noble.com is part of the company's initial round of funding, which totals $36 million. Vulcan Ventures Inc., the investment vehicle for Microsoft Corp. cofounder Paul Allen, is investing $10 million in MightyWords and $6 million is coming from other investors.