Barnes & Noble has just launched its ebook store and its ereader software (Mac, Windows, iPhone, Blackberry). Give credit to Barnes & Noble for (re-)entering the market. They’re certainly not quitters.

The company does a lot of things right. Its built in note taking feature is excellent. Click on the corner icon and up pops a note taking window that keeps track of all notes and their locations. Its bookmarking feature is just as good. It is all very intuitive.

But it’s not all good news. The Mac version has no way of downloading books or organizing your library. To purchase any content, Mac users will need to leave the B&N software and launch a browser. Now, this forced use of a browser doesn’t ruin the purchasing experience; but, the incoherent website does. After purchasing a book, Mac users must go to an entirely different part of the website in order to download that new book. Sound confusing? It is.

Once the book is downloaded and opened, the individual software is good. But, the overall ecosystem is incomplete. Barnes & Noble has received a lot of attention for allowing users to access their content on multiple screens. You can have your book on your home computer, your laptop, and your phone. This makes sense as I don’t want to drag my laptop onto the subway or cuddle up with it on my couch. I’d rather pull out my phone (or the soon to be released Plastic Logic device). The problem? In the B&N ecosystem, devices do not communicate with each other. If you’ve read a couple of chapters on your laptop, your other devices have no idea. When you pull out your phone, before you can begin reading, you’ll need to flick your way through the book to find the exact place you left off. Reading should not be that hard. Whatever benefit they hoped to achieve with its multiple screen capabilities is not worth the frustration caused by local-only copies of content.

Overall, it’s a decent start. The software and the store will work well for single device users. But, if the company hopes to grow an ebook business and compete with Amazon and Sony, it needs to provide a comparable experience surrounding all the devices its consumers use.