Barnes & Noble to sling their Nook - report As Barnes & Noble prepare investors for disappointing quarterly results on Thursday, the company will move away from making hardware and put more emphasis on shifting digital books, a New York Times source says. The company - America's biggest bookseller and the maker of the Nook tablet - has announced that yearly revenue for …
No; the "ass-hat" thinks they can make more money selling e-books for the hardware platforms that actually sell in significant numbers - i.e. Android tablets, iPads (and rather more spuriously) Microsoft tablets\phones. Nook reader apps are available for all those hardware platforms.
That only leaves the hardware Kindles, but they could sell open books for that - or not bother with that part of the market, since it's so tied to Amazon delivery system.
And they're probably right.
"Conspiracy theory, coincidence or the usual MS business practice ?"
None of those.
A traditional book retailer was never going to be able to develop its own hardware as a sustainable commercial offer - just because Amazon got the Kindle successfully to market, it was never going to work for B&N, because they don't have the digital expertise or scale of Amazon, and coming in afterwards with no real differentiation was never going to give them market share.
You can choose for yourselves whether this was a brave try that was ultimately unsuccessful (yet might have been), or whether B&N were simply the wrong company to try this, and moved too late into digital with inevitable consequences. I think the latter.
But you're right that one usual MS business practice is present, and that's the "two losers make one winner" maths that Ballmer seems to use. So just as they tried to and failed to be a Google with the failed aQuantive acquisition (and Bing hasn't made much noise in the search engine market), then they've tied up with the fast vanishing Nokia to be a player in mobile phones, here they're tying themselves to a failed ebook seller. If BB10 flops, then expect MS to bid for them. It's a pity Kodak have gone - MS could have bought them too.
given the rumors of an 8" Windows Blue device that have been floating around I wonder if there's a smart trajectory for these guys... dump their own platform but be a default pre-loaded app on every Win8/WinRT device?
Surface - with it's 16:9 aspect ratio - isn't the greatest for portrait reading (too tall/thin) but hopefully a 16:10 8" device would fit the sweet spot
They're just too good.
Unlike tablets, phones and, laptops, you don't need to upgrade. They work for years, there are no new features you'll ever want (you read books... that's more or less it... what more would you want?)
This is unlike other electronic products that generally break after a year and need to be constantly upgraded or replaced to keep up with the latest and greatest software.
The ereader manufacturers should just scale back production so you can replace the odd broken one and people who don't have one yet can get a new one. As at the end of the day no tablet/laptop/phone is as good at reading books on as an ereader.
I'm waiting off till colour ebook readers (they're out in Korea) but just coz a lot of the PDFs I'd want to read would be ropey in grey scale.
Best e-book readers aren't tablets anyway.. the screens aren't designed for reading in sunlight which is more important than you think. Choosing a device to save you luggage space (10 books or one tablet/reader?) usually means deciding on which device will last the longest without a recharge, will also survive a trip to the beach and won't give you tendonitis trying to use it with one hand while sipping a mai-tai from the other.
Personally I'd rather risk a 50 quid e-reader than a 500 quid tablet if I wanted to relax on the beach. Obviously the 5 quid book is better but not having to decide which to bring or having the agony of forgetting the book you really wanted makes the gamble worthwhile.
I had always assumed the Nook would break even at best, and they wanted to shift them into peoples hands to increase EBook sales. They should probably not waste mony designing a bunch of NEW Nook models, I mean, if it's already good for reading books their job is done. It'd be best to ship their books in non-proprietary formats (if they aren't already), but a Nook app would be good as well if they don't already have one; there's something to be said for having the same books pull up on the web Kindle viewer, on the Android device (with Kindle app) and on whatever actual Kindle you may own.
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