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Barnes & Noble Won't Give Up On the Nook
jfruh writes "Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader line has largerly been regarded as a botched attempt to compete with the Kindle, whose failure has contributed to the bookseller's financial woes. Well, despite earlier statements that the company was abandoning it as a hardware platform, now the B&N CEO insists that the company is committed to the product line and the new Nooks are in development."
Everyone knows the Mirco$oft offering is vastly superior in every way!
I have an older Kindle, and 2 Kobo's. I've never tried a Nook (can't recall ever seeing one in a store up here in Canada but the Kobo's can be found in lots of stores) so I can't tell if it's better or not. I don't tend to judge by features only, I like trying them out. A big selling point with me is there needs to be a button to turn the page and it has to be comfortable to hold with 1 hand while turning pages, something you can't really do with touch gestures to turn pages. Basically when I'm asking is, what does Nook bring to the table that the others do not?
of a company proactively doing the right thing, embracing technology at the risk of cannibalizing its own products by redefining their business as something larger than selling books. They implemented the technology the right way, or at least have received awards and top scores from magazines such as Consumer Reports, set a reasonable price (easily within the budget of a large proportion of existing customers), and marketed it aggressively - the Nook is front and center in many of the B&N stores I go to.
And it still hasn't worked out for them.
So the next time you hear some MBA smarties belittling CEOs of flailing companies for not having the vision to go beyond what made them successful in the past, remember the Nook. It's not as easy as these pundits make it sound.
I love my Nook. Pleeease keep the form factor and size the exact same in future models so I can keep using my nifty Oberon cover. A couple of other suggestions, really amp up the contrast so it looks like paper, and let me read more than one book at once. That would about do it, everything else is perfect.
Nooks are great. And I really want B&N to survive since they have shown they can think out of the box.
My family and I have several Nooks over the years, and they have been great. I've never owned or tried a Kindle, so I can't speak to any performance comparisons, but it has everything we want in an eReader:
The Color versions have also been pretty damn durable. Along with the usual "oops!" as it falls off the edge of the bed or the cat knocks it off the table, my wife accidentally ran over one with her car (dark night, carrying too many things out at once, etc). The screen was ruined, but it powered on/off in a normal way, so I plugged it into the computer, transferred whatever local files we wanted to recover, then pulled the SD card and put it into a new one--practically picking up where we left off.
So I've never really understood the Nook hate out there: Good, solid devices that last for years under normal wear and tear, and seamlessly work between versions.
* I am a software developer, so I know that the account synchronization is not "magic", but I also know that there are dozens of ways to shortcut the process and screw it up--none of which I've seen in the Nook ecosystem.
I picked up the deep discounted HD+ last weekend. Pretty awesome deal - $179 for a 9" 32G ($149 for the 16G version if you can find them) tablet w/ 1920x1080 screen. No camera, no microUSB, no uHDMI out...but does have GPS, a uSD slot, and can sideload real Android, and purportedly Ubuntu. Wifi seems pretty solid, and the screen is very crisp. Biggest downside is the old/slow CPU - things can get a bit laggy - but for what I use it for (books, email, web surfing) its a helluva deal. A few apps I've tried to load from the playstore won't install, but nothing thats a deal breaker. I've had an iPad, an overpriced POS from Toshiba, and lately a 7" Tab 2 thats very flaky; the Nook HD+ beats them all either on readability, stability, or price.
Alas I don't know if BN can turn the business side around without stripping the Nook down to a basic B&W reader, and locking folks down to the BN store.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
I have seen their website crash a page several times. And I should not have to login again to be in the nook section.
And their content hierarchy could be better so that finding stuff is easier. They need more sub-genre support.
Trying to display cover-art on e-ink displays makes little sense to me. We didnt buy e-ink for the pictures, so give
us content that is text. And do it fast and rich.
Make the e-ink books better at navigating your content and you will sell more content.
Even if the "nook is back", I wouldn't purchase another.
I debated between that and the Kindle years ago. I finally decided on the nook after reading that it had double the battery life. Ha! I turned off every wireless connection it had and the thing still wouldn't last more than a few days before begging to be recharged. This fell drastically short of their claims. There are many threads about this problem out there, I only wish I had searched for them before my purchase.
on my Nook. And I couldn't be happier. Unless of course the world moved away from its addiction to flash.
I thought even president Obama said that they are commited to dismantle their nooks ?
Erm... Will the new ones be the result of the announced partnership with microsoft after refusing to sign the patent deal over the use of Android?
I think your post's content demonstrates the reason why the lameness filter exists.
There should be more out there then the kindle.
I actually like the nook better for a couple reasons. Its just two bad that B&N is so small compared to the monster Amazon has become.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Citation needed.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
I owned the original Nook with the small lcd screen along the bottom and the newer simple touch nook. I'm a tall guy with larger hands and the original nook was a good fit for me but I like the simple touch for the weight of it. As far as compelling differences between the Kindle and Nook line up - I don't see a huge difference besides compatibility with different formats. It seems like the Nook has better open standard support. This can be alleviated by using a program like Calibre to convert the books http://calibre-ebook.com/ though. Also, I believe the touch screen Kindles do not have hardware buttons.
As of right now there is no reason for me to upgrade to anything newer since I can read any book I want now on my simple touch. I don't like using an LCD screen to do any marathon reading as it is harsh on the eyes so an LCD for me is out of the question. I read a lot of books - one series alone was 40 books long - try that with an LCD screen and my eyes would hate me.
Now, if they came out with a hybrid e-ink / LCD device I can get on board with that: Color E-ink for the E-ink screen so I can read books in b&w or other documents in color in the bright light or for long periods of time. Possibly have a glowlight as well?
LCD for when indoors / regular tablet functions
Give me that and I'll definitely buy that new device as long as it's implemented properly with sharpness and clarity for both functions. One of the complaints with the Nook w/glowlight was a slightly more washed out look to the screen in comparison to the regular simple touch. I bought one of the glowlights from Radioshack for $30 when it got clearanced out and gave it to my brother as it just didn't have the same sharpness. I think Amazon won with backlighting - looked like a superior technology with better viewing options.
"Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader line has largerly been regarded as a botched attempt to compete with the Kindle, whose failure has contributed to the bookseller's financial woes."
The Kindle's failure has contributed to the bookseller's financial woes? I don't think so. Learn to English, kthx
I bought a nook Simple Touch for my Mother's birthday. It seemed like a good deal (reduced from £80 to £30 for "London Literacy Week") and there were numerous books listed in the "free content" from the 1800s that had been published right next to where she lived that would be of interest to her in her Genealogy hobby.
From the start I was annoyed by it - you couldn't activate it to use in any way without first associating it both with a working Credit Card and an active email address. As it was going to be a surprise I had to go to the trouble of setting up a separate email address just so she wouldn't be tipped off by the (non-optional) "purchase notifications" it sent to that address every time you added a book.
Then, there were the restrictions. 80% of the storage was reserved for DRM'd material - if you downloaded restriction-free files from Gutenberg or similar you could only fill 20% of the provided storage. Oh, and remember all those "free" books I researched before buying it? *Every one* on the US site refused to download saying that "For copyright reasons this content is restricted to US downloads only". Even though I was in Scotland, and the books were published in Scotland, *in the 1800s*...
Oh, and the clunky DRM support requires you to run a piece of third-party (Adobe) software to "authenticate" the device that's not available in any form under Linux. I ended up having to download and install a pirate copy of Windows just to be able to initialise the machine! (I feel so *dirty*...)
There turned out to be a much smaller selection available on the UK site. Of those, maybe one in six would fail to download and crash the machine. Barnes and Noble "fixed" this by deleting the files remotely, and proudly emailed to say the problem had been "resolved". Er, no. "Resolved" would have been for the books to be in a condition to be read on the device that was purchased to read them - anything else doesn't qualify as a "resolution".
The device itself died three weeks into setting it up, and it took the best part of *two months* to get a replacement. (From their factory in Poland...) Which was dead on arrival. At least the next replacement took less than a week. And then I had to set about loading all the books from scratch.
Oh, and the "local number" telephone support was a very faint woman with a Canadian-sounding accent over a bad VoIP link with a 2-3 second delay. But you don't need to worry about that any more, as since I had all these problems they've withdrawn the support number entirely and now you are forced to use "Live Chat" on the wensite during the hours of 9am-6pm. *Their* time zone. Which translates to 5pm-2am where I live.
So, now it works. Except that as my Mother doesn't have a Credit Card I've had to leave it registered with mine. And something like 80% of the "Front Page" you get when you turn it on is something that will lead to you spending money if you click on it. I've had to simply scramble the wi-fi settings so it can't communicate to purchase *anything*. If they'd been a bit more subtle about it I might have left her with the option of buying new books, but as things stand their money-grabbing philosophy has backfired.
Sorry this is such a long rant. The really annoying thing, above all else, is that when it works it works really well - the touch screen is extremely responsive, the battery life is good and if they didn't screw you with the hellishly intrusive DRM I would have been happy to pay two to three times as much for the hardware.
B&N has been Ballmer'd
Barnes and Noble has a policy where they only sell to Americans. It's unbelievably stupid. I've spent literally thousands of dollars on ebooks in the last few years on Amazon.com. During that time, I've tried on 2 separate occasions buying something from B&N, with no success. I even tried purchasing a gift certificate credit, but when I tried using it for an ebook, they didn't accept it. That's why Amazon.com has and always will beat the crap out of B&N IMO.
You know when a CEO insists that the company is committed to the product line that it's only a matter of time until they're gone.
Once they dump as many of the readers that are in the pipeline as possible, they'll drop the Nook faster than Anthony Weiner drops his pants.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have a 7 and 10 inch tablets. Both are Androids and both have the Kindle and Nook apps on them. I buy different books for different reasons for the two platforms. There seem to be fewer and fewer Kindles and Nooks in the wild. Most people doing what I am doing and reading on mobile devices. I actually lent a Nook eBook to a colleague at work. However, according to the pundits, eBook sales are 'faltering'. I just Googled "ebook sales 2013".
A while back, my little sister picked up a Nook Tablet for, what was it? Like $170? Back in May I picked up a 7" Android 4.0 tablet from China that kicks its ass for $30. (In fact, I bought four different ones, and one of those 'Android TV stick' devices, for a total of $145, god bless DealExtreme.)
Just pull the plug, B&N. Concentrate on content distribution, and maintaining the reader app. I think in the long run, the Nook is nothing more than an unnecessary expenditure that exposes them to equally unnecessary financial risks. Hell, if they really want a branded tablet to sell in their stores, they should just re-brand one of those Chinese ones, and cut it out with the custom OS crap that makes it 'not quite an Android device'.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
i rooted my nook color and installed the kindle app on it.
Bought the Tablet the week of release and paid around $250.00 w/handsome flip cover. It's fits in my suit pocket so it actually goes to meetings. Great screen - easy to read, displays AV content pleasingly (charts, pics, NetFlix etc), good sound. Has page numbers! With format-shifting Calibre I can load any content out there and the expandable memory let's me add all I need. Mine's nearly two years old so the idea of "doing it again" is basically moot. Technology marches etc...I'd buy something up to the 2013 minute now, like the new Nexus 7 with faster page loading maybe, but I have no need to replace my Nook. It's still doing what I paid it to do in '11. It's bulletproof. Battery holding up...It's a real GLU, a great little unit.
best reader on the market:
- long battery life
- good screen
- inexpensive
- microSDHC
- charger works w/LG phones, TMobile hotspots
i never use the wifi on mine - no need, really
Books are primarily going to be sold for eReaders. They don't so much need "the nook" as much as they need an eReader. Applications for a competitor's hardware is known to be destined for failure when you compete with companies that do not play fair, U.S. v. M.S.. My money says selling books that will be read by someone else's software on someone else's hardware will always be less profitable than selling real books.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Competition is good.
On a personal note i prefer the simple touch nook over kindle due to native ePub support. And the hardware just 'feels' better. ( yes, that's an abstract opinion )
Now, if they can come out with color.. And get rid of the gloworm version of the simple touch..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Looks terrible in the store.. You telling me its not bad in the flesh?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hey, if you are listening.. 9.5" color e-ink please..
Come out with one of them, ill buy 2 more simple touches as a thanks..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My brother has a basic, $69 Kindle. I have the basic Nook Simple Touch (no glow light). Having used both extensively, I can say the Nook Simple Touch beats the Kindle considerably.
First, let me say I don't buy many e-books, instead using Project Gutenberg (which has both DRM free EPUBS and MOBI files), and Google Books for free, non copyright extant EPUBS (though I've used Caliber to convert them for my Brother's Kindle). So my use case might be a bit special.
Oh, and I use the local library website to download EPUBS onto my Nook. Yes I use Linux. There is a simple work-around to get Adobe Editions to work under Linux, and yes it works under AMD 64 as well as 32 bit Intel. You can also map under WINE your Nook as a floppy drive (stupid but two minutes of work) to put Library books onto your Nook.
Now, it is much simpler under the Kindle ... BUT downloading through Amazon the library books you check out allows Amazon to know what you're reading.
That's fine if you are very, very confident that information about yourself won't be abused. That you won't get nailed for say, checking out the ebook versions of Kevin Mitnick's books. Or what not. That's not something I'm comfortable with.
For me, the Nook rocks in that Library e-book checkouts remain only with the Library, and not with Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Privacy is worth that extra step and it works fine under Linux.
So, with a basic 8 GB MicroSDHC card, I have only a fraction of storage exploited by my many free ebook downloads. The Bible, complete works of Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, and many interesting, 19th Century ebooks from Google Books? Check. No boredom there.
If you are inclined, you can find/google DRM tools, remove any DRM from Amazon books, and convert them from Caliber. Or vice-versa. Or just for back up. I've bought a few books from B&N, they were within fifty cents of Amazon (a bit more, but not much). Their website sucks, but is navigable. Its pretty much like Amazon's.
I don't have the deluxe glowlight version, I do have a separate LED booklight which works OK. The Nook is a godsend at Doctor's offices, the DMV, other wait-heavy places. I cannot praise it enough. Having that MicroSDHC card is a godsend, you can literally load up with thousands of free, high quality ebooks from the greatest authors in history and never, ever get bored.
Want to read Livy, or 19th Century biographies of Napoleon, or Clausewitz, or Don Quixote, or some obscure book off of Google Books? Load em all up, no need to worry about space, with 8 GB I've still got plenty of room, and the Nook supports up to 16 GB in that card slot.
Let's work that out. It basically equates to 16,000 books in a tiny device.
Add to that the page physical buttons, and touch-screen, and it beats the bejabbers out of the Kindle basic version. Fonts are nice too, and you get a bunch.
And yes I also have the Nook HD+. That is great for web surfing and light email replies, will run neat Google Play apps like free chess, backgammon, various calculators, etc. Again with a MicroSDHC card of up to 64 GB, you can stuff all sorts of videos downloaded from EduX sites like MIT, and watch all sorts of lectures by world class professors for free. Yes you'll need to download the videos, and rip them to various constraints using various tools like Handbrake or ffmpeg. But its free. And you can swap out videos easily. And yes you can mount the Nook HD+ under Linux.
The Glowlight version has been discounted to only $99. If I did not already have my basic Nook I'd get one.
I have both a G3 Kindle (Kindle Keyboard) and a Nook Simple Touch.
My Nook Simple Touch is more versatile right off the bat since it does ePub and can support Adobe's DRM. First thing I did to the thing was root it. It was great rooted, I could access my entire Kindle library save for the one audio book, and I was even able to make the page turn buttons work for it. With the limitation that the buttons worked for Kindle or Nook books but not both at the same time (grumble grumble). I was also able to get it to access my entire Google Book library with an old pre-"play" version of the app without resorting to the Adobe stuff.
After playing with the Nook, the Kindle, Calibre, and the Adobe management stuff in my Windows virtual machine I was able to get all my books save for the Kindle DRMed ones on the Nook anyway without the root. I went ahead and unrooted it. The Nooks battery doesn't seem to last as long as the Kindle's, but it's physically smaller. All in all I would say it was the cheaper, supperior device. I don't really care for touch screen, but it does make the whole device more compact since it doesn't need external controls, they just shaved that area off the bottom in comparison to the Kindle, even the modern 4th Gen Kindle.
Now I get my books from multiple sources, I still use Amazon, I pick up good deals on Google, I'm a Humble Bundle junkie having bought both of their ebook offerings, and I even pick up one from Barnes and Noble occasionally. They do seem to be the least deal and price concious of the bunch, but they have the occasional exclusive.
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Disclaimer: Some of this information may be out of date.
I have a nook tablet, and it's a nice piece of hardware.
I don't use it at all. It's locked down tight, so you can't fix any of the problems with it. The web browser is awful, and when it crashes (every day, several times a day), it locks up the whole device, and you have to reboot the thing. And forget about getting access to the android store, or installing your own apps.
Basically, B+N are far too concerned about making the nook the channel for their content. If they only had the vision to open up the platform, and just piggy-back on the success of the hardware, they would have dominated the market. The way things are though, I would not recommend the nook to anyone.
When I bought my first Kindle (Keyboard), I did a lot of research. I had cataracts, and needed the highest contrast screen. At the time that was the Kindle Keyboard (there was no Kindle Touch yet) The Kindle Keyboard had the best screen at the time. At that time I already had a considerable collection of ebooks in plain text format that the nook and some others would not read without converting them to other formats.
Yes, I have Calibre, but conversions still have some formatting problems. The Kindle Keyboard can also be used by my blind girlfriend with a little help getting books loaded. I still have the KK, though I now use my Kindle Touch most of the time now. Amazon has much better customer support than Barns and Noble.
Overall the features of the Kindle Touch, Amazon's customer service, and better selection of ebooks in Kindle, mobi, and text format works better for me. Other's milage may vary.
They could easily fix this. Make it a little smaller and call it the nookie.
Everybody wants a little nookie.
The only thing missing, IMHO, is the ability to display the meta-data that Calibre adds. IWhen I have a series loaded and want to read them in order, I have to an external source to figure out which one is next. Other then that I really enjoy my ST. Had an old kindle, but when it died I went to the ST.
...but I think the biggest problem with the Nook and Barnes & Nobel going forward is not the Nook hardware (widely acclaimed, see above) or the selection of books, (especially considering that you're not limited to B&N content) or even the Android platform options and marketplace options that B&N has elected through the years.
The problem that the Nook has at this time, and going forward is the Investment that Microsoft made in B&N. As that is the factor that has essentially destroyed Nokia as a brand, I can't see anyone thinking that it's going to help B&N over the long term.
You never know...