Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft May Acquire Nook Tablet Business From Barnes and Noble
whoever57 writes "According to a report in Techcrunch, Microsoft is considering buying out the remaining shares in Nook Media. Microsoft already owns 17% of Nook Media. Documents reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue selling tablets and transition to a model under which media is distributed through partners."
(Also at SlashCloud.)
So, the Nook is history, and we will see a crippled Sidewalk or Ceiling Tile or Man Hole or whatever that Microsoft thing is? Oh yes... The Surface.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If you can't grow a market, just buy one.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well, it's an improvement. They stopped innovating and went to almost 10 years of mee-too-itis, not learning from IBM and OS 2, and it caught up to them. So buy an innovation that isn't mee too.
Buying other peoples' successful stuff has its own issues.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That the Nook had a market to burn. The hardware-for-price was a winner for the form factor but ultimately B&Ns walled garden app store proved once again that what people really want is selection.
I own 3 nooks, but they're all running CM 10.1. Stock ROM is very limited.
Microsoft bought Nook up when Barns & Noble stood up to them saying take it to court of bugger off. So rather then risk loosing in court and in turn having all of the android device manufacturers turning on them, they tried to save face and "partnered" with Barns and Noble, who being primarily book sellers not tech people weren't familiar with the Microsoft motto "embrace extend extinguish".
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Right. Don't get in the way of, or call him out on, his irrationality.
If "what people really want is selection", then why do people buy video game consoles instead of PCs? PCs have a far larger selection of video games and other applications than consoles due to the far lower overhead and the far less strict developer qualifications. Why would people want selection on a tablet but not on a TV?
I also like my simple touch. Unfortunately, I have a feeling Microsoft will nuke the ebooks I've bought through B&N just like they did to all the songs marked as "plays for sure".
With no Nook, how will Barnes and Noble survive? They're the last major US bookstore chain, and they've already closed many of their stores.
That’s only half right - Barns and Noble has been having issues with year – thanks to Amazon. When the initial purchase was made I did not hear a peep about the lawsuit from anybody – It was B&N was getting out of clicks to focus on bricks.
These going away is a good reason to buy one now. The simple touch is great for rooting giving you a pretty good e-ink android tablet. I've been eyeing them on eBay for a couple weeks now. Time to pull the trigger I think.
Well, one issue is that the units auto-update so they can do whatever they want with it. Another is that they basically own your library. A third is that Microsoft has a competing product in the surface. Another is that Microsoft makes it clear that they just Don't Get It(TM) and I don't expect them to do anything good with the Nook and I also don't expect them to leave it alone. And finally, Microsoft has given us many reasons to loathe them over the years.
But yeah, rant on about fanboyism. That's all it is.
I'm not going to get rid of mine. I'm going to run my files through calibre and just keep it as an offline device until it is time to replace it (maybe with a Kindle). And I'll install cyanogenmod on my Nook Tablet.
These going away is a good reason to buy one now. The simple touch is great for rooting giving you a pretty good e-ink android tablet. I've been eyeing them on eBay for a couple weeks now. Time to pull the trigger I think.
You missed out. Yesterday the Simple Touch went on clearance at Radio Shack for $20, and the one with GlowLight was $30. The scum of the Earth, I mean, eBay resellers, will have cleaned them out by now, unless you get super lucky. I snagged the last regular Simple Touch at my local one for a grand total of $20.97 and I'm going to Nooter it this weekend..
It was B&N was getting out of clicks to focus on bricks.
The B&N CEO must have just read The Road Ahead.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
First Microsoft sued Barnes and Noble, and B&N went to court to fight. Then they reached a settlement in which Microsoft agreed to make a large investment in their digital media business. Now Microsoft seems to be about to buy Nook. Next, Windows 8 Mini-tablets? Even with patents, purchasing, and the long march towrds their OS on all tablets, will this work? How many billions will this cost?
Yup. Same ol' sleazy "business model" they've used from the very beginning. And they say China has no tech imagination. Anyway, so long, Nook, it's been good to know you. Probly won't like you anymore once the price goes up 300 or 400 percent and you get an ugly new MS scare-mask face.
17 percent stake doesn't give them significant control. Now they can let their shit fly unimpeded. Big difference. Only silver lining is that the remaining stock might sell out for next to nothing, and the Nook is easily modded to run pure Android, IIRC.
It says they will discontinue selling tablets, so what does MS get from the deal ? The Nook brand name with no products ? Does not seem buying it to run a marketplace for a dead end tablet would make sense either.
Lesser sites might offer conjectures about why MS might be interested in Nook - or, might not be. Perhaps the up and down sides of such a strategy. That would be interesting to read.
But ragging on typo's is much more /.. Woot!
Yeah, I know the Nook was ok... Maybe the time has come for B&N to create an actualy good e-reader, like nothing already in the market.
Or maybe they could stop locking themselves behind plataforms, and create something for all tablet-like devices out there. With unobstrusive or no DRM.
Rethinking email
I also like my simple touch. Unfortunately, I have a feeling Microsoft will nuke the ebooks I've bought through B&N just like they did to all the songs marked as "plays for sure".
I buy books from B&N (and occasionally Google, when their prices are better) because I believe in supporting authors and the publishers that put out their books.
I also immediately crack the books I buy and store copies of them locally and on cloud storage, so I'll never lose them just because the Nook store shuts down. Removing the DRM takes less than a second.
Breakfast served all day!
The main problem B&N has is the lack of truly open tablets. When I want to read one of my Nook books, I read it on my Kindle using the Nook app (or on my old E-ink Nook if it's a novel and not a technical manual).
So, given that, why were they in the tablet business? Because if they relied on other tablets to carry their application, they risked being muscled completely out of the market.Now the Nook app was trivial to install on my Kindle, but I expect that Amazon could break it in their gimped implementation/fork of Android if they wanted.
(Incidentally, before anyone thinks, "well you are the sucker who bought a gimped Android Kindle," I haven't bought either a Nook or a Kindle, they were both gifts. I did buy a Blackberry Playbook, so who be smart now? Yaaarr....)
i'm trying to figure out who "walled garden" is good for other than the first movers who get a demi-monopoly and the top also ran who gets to live on the edge of the cliff unless they take the throne. (See: The History of Video Games NES to Present.)
To me it's idiotic that Microsoft, who built their business on "we don't care who makes software as long as it's for our platform, though someday we may steal your idea and give it away for free with the OS," trying to be the 4th place Also-ran walled garden. but I'm just a simple country programmer... I still think there's money to be made by someone saying "screw the walled garden, we'll make it up in marketshare."
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Uhhhh...because like those that bought playsforsure devices, Kin and Sidekick he has EVERY right to believe that MSFT will kill support for the existing devices and try to force the owners into a "Microsoft Ecosystem" where the devices cost more than Apple's and the media is more expensive to boot?
While i'm 100% against rampant flag waving and fanboyism and am quick to call them to the carpet when they do so anybody who owns a device that is bought out by MSFT has every right to seriously think about dumping it before it becomes worthless, just ask those that had a Toshiba beat (which is what became the Zune) how much support they got after MSFT bought it.
This is coming from somebody who has built, owned, and supported Windows hardware since Win 3.11FW and NT 3 and frankly I wouldn't trust the company either when it comes to the consumer space, their track record is pathetic.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Thanks for the heads up, didn't know they were easy to make into an android tablet. I have been noticing in previous weeks that Nooks have been showing up a LOT on sites like IceMonkey and Woot! so I figured something had to be going on with B&N, I just figured they were gonna walk away after losing their shirt against Amazon.
While I feel sorry for anybody who bought a Nook at full price i can't blame B&N for getting what they can by selling it to MSFT, its just a damned shame that you can say goodbye to the cheap Nooks and Nook Colors as MSFT will probably pull the plug and try to "monetize" the customers by making it a service that only runs on those $$$ Surface pads they can't give away.
But now that I know they can run Android (Which version? ICS?) I'll have to keep an eye out as i missed out on the cheap Playbooks and Touchpads and the hardware on the Color looks nice, thanks again.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I like my Nook. I only use it for reading so it's limitations compared to a tablet never bothered me. Microsoft will likely rip out its basic Android underpinnings and replace them with Windows. The result will be a seemingly underpowered "general purpose" device that tries to do everything (but often not well). More importantly, the battery life will be cut substantially due to Windows lower efficiency. They'll effectively ruin the Nook as an e-reader.
I'm in Canada and they don't sell em here and eBay is pretty much the easiest option. So I HOPE a lot of eBay scum snatched them up in volume and try to out-do each other on price!
Dear Lord save us from those that don't know their history! The whole book of revelations wasn't accepted as canon for quite awhile because it was written by a guy having fever dreams who basically sat down in a cave when he was burning up with fever and wrote down what he saw. Now if I wrote down what i saw tripping on Peyote, would you think me a prophet?
Even if you take the rest of the book as gospel and not simply as a book of parables on how to live a better life i don't see how anybody in their right mind could take the ramblings of a guy burning up with fever as a "vision from God" because if that is true? well I bet half the guys here have had a vision from god at least one time in the past.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Personally, I buy video game consoles because the games I want to play are released only for consoles.
No matter what console you buy, you can't play both Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Halo 3 because not only are these exclusive to consoles, but they're also exclusive to different consoles. Do people actually buy and carry an iPad for iOS-only applications, a Nexus tablet for Google Play-only applications, a Kindle Fire for Kindle-only streaming videos, and a Nook for Nook-only whatever?
For another, why are third- party games "released only for consoles" in the first place? I imagine that it'd be easier to port an Xbox 360 game to Windows than to port it to PlayStation 3 because DirectX for Windows is far more similar to DirectX for Xbox 360 than either is to libgcm for PlayStation 3. Yet Mortal Kombat (2011) is available on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 but not PC. To continue the analogy, is there some sort of incentive for publishers to make their works available on Nook but not the iBookstore or Google Play Books?
And anybody who doesn't think MSFT is a failing company need only look to the history of playsforsure, which for the rest of this I'll call PFS for short.
At the time PFS was the only real competition that iTunes had and thanks to MSFT taking an open approach to Apple's walled garden was actually growing at a fairly good clip. Not only did just about every PMP other than the iPod have PFS support but there was a whole new market opened up in the "all you can eat" rental model where you were basically given the money you paid for the service each month back in free MP3s and the device only had to be hooked to a PC once a month to re-authorize which let you change out the songs you downloaded through the services. This was actually even getting talk of creating a popular alternative to iTunes as it allowed anybody for $10-$15 a month to have all the songs their PMP could hold while adding more features, such as playlists made by fans of the genres so you could just hook up and get an "all metal" or "just top 40" or whatever playlist loaded to your system with a single touch.
So what happened? Just as we are seeing now in other arenas MSFT's management couldn't stand the thought of "only" getting a few cents for each MP3 and PMP player sold and instead wanted the entire thing (like Apple surprise surprise) so they killed it figuring "well if they bought from the other guys they will pay us more for the same service, right?" and instead of growing the market, having a real competitor to iTunes, and even having a way to get a toehold into the living room by adding a video plays for sure they instead totally wiped out the entire market almost overnight. In less than a year all the services that used PFS was shuttered, iTunes had no real competition until Amazon came along, and they went from getting a few cents for every MP3 and PMP sold on the planet to getting $0 for each.
To me this perfectly illustrates how the leadership at MSFT doesn't even understand the market or their strengths but instead are so damned focused on doing things like Apple that they are just killing the company. MSFT is NOT Apple, will never BE Apple, and trying to shoehorn them into that market would be like trying to make IBM popular with hip hop fans, it just isn't gonna work.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
HA HA!
It's like... when you have a good idea and it's snatched out of the air by Microsoft Alien Crafts hovering above monitoring every citizen's EEGs and buying their way through the hedge maze.
If they buy it, i'm dumping my simple touch ( which i do love ). Screw them, and the horse they rode in on.
That's just silly.
Microsoft has owned a significant (but not majority) steak in Nook for some time, certainly when you purchased your unit. And, what does Nook's future direction (into the toilet) have to do with its past when you purchased your unit from Nook who at that time already had a significant Microsoft ownership?
Oh, that's right, fan boys and common sense don't mix...
Not so fast. There are serious ramifications here.
The Nook is 2 things: A) the Nook hardware, which is what Microsoft is apparently buying out. B) the Nook B&N store, which they presumably aren't, since that part effectively is B&N.
Without the B&N store, a Nook loses a lot of what it was purchased for, so if Microsoft should drop that particular function in a future OS upgrade, your entire Nook library effectively gets erased. You may be able to install a Nook app to some other device/desktop/phone, but the Nook unit itself might be left unable to serve as a B&N e-reader. This is even more of a problem when you consider that all but the first generation of Nooks keep their B&N purchases in a hidden space inaccessible to the tablet filesystem.
So there's good reason to get bent here.
"Documents reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue selling tablets and transition to a model under which media is distributed through partners"
According to the Techcrunch report, Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android-based tablet business. Are these two events related?
AccountKiller
Nope. The nook simple touch was released almost a year before microsoft invested in nook. Very plausible that he like me bought it before the deal had been announced.
I think that this makes sense, at least from BN's standpoint. They keep having to drop the cost of the nook to compete, and it turns out they really don't make any money on the device anyway. The whole point of it is so they can sell their books. That's where they make money. Since you can download the nook software on just about any device, why actually have one? As for Msft buying them out. That's a win for BN, and a loss for Msft. Other than the name, I don't see any real reason my Msft would want to purchase it.
My Nook Simple-Touch runs straight up Android fine for the most part, few things are buggy and don't work right, but it's not exactly meant to be high power.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
. . . grabbing at anything to stay afloat.
... They have squandered so much potential and they seem to determined to squander their vast fortune buying out one failed project after another and running it thoroughly into the ground.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That could have actually worked.
That did actually work. It's called Android.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I see this comment all the time: "Microsoft has the money and revenue streams to play the long game, to make bold bets, to stick it out. Early days yet."
Well, yes, Microsoft has a lot of money offshore and a lot of money coming in. But they don't have infinite money. The offshore money isn't "real" until they bring it home to spend and take a 40% haircut on it. They're sinking two billion a year into Bing and the rest of OSD, a billion into Nokia, billions in marketing to get their mobile business off the ground and pretend W8 is going super, and tens of billions in share buybacks and dividends to prop up their stock price, tens of billions a year in failed acquisitions. In the wise words of Bill Gates: "A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon it adds up to real money." It is not an inexhaustible spigot. They can "fail" every so often but once in a while they have to "win". They ain't been winning new money for a long time now.
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to derail your conversation. But when I see this so idly said it makes me sad that so much money is being burned in a hopeless cause when I know what an able, competent, intelligent and compassionate man could do with it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A lot of the e-readers are rebadged Chinese designs with custom software (eg. some of the Kobo line) and the Nook may be in the same boat. MS may just be buying the software and the people that have written it.
I don't get the connection between this http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/15/171201/barnes-noble-names-microsofts-disputed-android-patents and what's happening now.
In fact, because of B&Ns stand, I would have bought a nook here in the UK.
D
I doubt the old nook and nook color will have windows 8 ported to it. I doubt the nook color could run it, but the newer nook tablet might. Or they'll just stop updates and create a Nook Surface if they want to continue making hardware.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
So Nook was a failure for B&N?
Pretty much. They're pretty much getting their asses handed to them by Amazon, Apple and Google. I'm not sure I know anyone who actually owns a Nook though obviously they have been selling a fair number. When people think technology, Barnes & Noble isn't exactly the first name that springs to mind. Though the Nook seems to be a decent product it has the vague scent of desperation about it. Given what happened with Borders one has to wonder if they are buying a product that is going to be abandoned by B&N down the road.
A lot of the e-readers are rebadged Chinese designs with custom software (eg. some of the Kobo line) and the Nook may be in the same boat. MS may just be buying the software and the people that have written it.
I think we can safely say that B&N doesn't own any "Nook Factories" that they sold to Microsoft, so it would be the Nook IP and channels that's being transferred. The Nooks are not, however generic devices with a Nook badge slapped on them, however, as you swiftly learn when a cable goes bad.
However much of the insides are commodity parts (and sooner or later, almost everything electronic incorporates commodity parts), there are definitely bits of bespoke hardware, and the Nook OS itself is a secretive version of Android.
Microsoft buys you.
Farewell Nook, we hardly knew ya.
The sale of, uh, partnership agreement of the Nook should shore up B&N for a week or two.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It's a chain of bookstores in the US. They also have a web site where they sell books direct much like Amazon sells books.