As soon as B&N announced nook stating that over one million e-books were available downloadable including Google Books for nook, people got puzzled trying to find out where are those books. I even tried to find the actual number of e-books available on B&N’s e-book site. Unlike amazon, B&N’s cataloging of e-books seems little weird. If you add up all the numbers by looking at the different genre of e-books you would end up with numbers less than 100,000. So where are the rest of the books, at least the other 900,000 e-books? Even if you think there are 500,000 Google books then there should be at least 400,000 on B&N’s e-book store.
Recently, I learned from the B&N’s e-book discussion board as someone suggested that if you type * in the search field in the e-book store it’ll show the total number of e-books available on the store. Click here, and you will see the total number of e-books like the following picture:
You can also see the number of e-books downloadable on the left sidebar as you can see on the right picture. 
However, when you add up all the numbers on the left sidebar where books are shown according to genre, you don’t get total number of books available for download, it’s still less than 100,000. This shows how poorly B&N has catalogued the e-books. In order to digg things out I tried to sort the e-books by price, and found that all Google books are there.
So, nook owners will get the Google books from B&N e-book store, not from Google books website. Here is what I found from B&N’s e-book FAQs:
How do I get free public domain titles from Google Books?
Free titles are indicated by a “Get Free” button in place of the “Buy Now” button. Barnes & Noble.com has partnered with Google Books to bring you half a million public domain titles for free. Look for these titles throughout the website, as indicated by the icon shown below.
Together with Google, Barnes & Noble brings you access to over 500,000 public domain books for free. Now you can search, browse, and read over half a million public domain books preserved by the world’s great libraries on Barnes & Noble.com.
Search the full text of books and discover new ones at http://books.google.com
Do I need a Google account to access these free titles from Google?
No, but you are required to sign into your Barnes & Noble.com account. Creating a Barnes & Noble.com account is free.
I think B&N should make the e-book store more customer-friendly, and easily searchable. I really admire Amazon in this regard.
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