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Barnes & Noble To Spin Off Nook Media, Will Take It Public
Nate the greatest writes It looks like the recent rumors about B&N splitting up were true. Along with could-have-been-worse financial news, Barnes & Noble just announced that it's going to spin off its two-year-old ebook subsidiary into a new publicly traded company. The move won't be finalized until 2015, but when it happens the new company is expected to have both existing parts of Nook Media, including the less than successful ebook division and B&N College, which is still managing to turn a profit.
is a bald-headed guy to demo the coolness of their products. (Hint: the company begins with teh letter "A".)
Bricks & Nothing?
Isn't the aim of going public to get investors? Is there anyone on the planet who is going to invest in the failure that is Nook?
Don't chuck your dead-tree books just yet!
After the likes of Barnes & Noble have done away with them, and some years
of 'Verelendung' (see wiki), all those paper books will regain a new worth.
I love my nook. The form factor is perfect, the interface is almost perfect (please let me have several books open at once and let me scribble notes), and I have a snazzy embossed leather covering so they'd better not alter the shape or size of any future models. Also user-changeable batteries for longevity would be splendid. Besides that though screen contrast is the only needed improvement, no attaching LEDs to the inner face isn't the same thing. Actually i could go for customised bodywork too if they made the design moddable.
B&N bought Fictionwise, where I was buying about $2000/year of eBooks before the publishers managed to kill just about every eBook store that carried their stuff except Amazon and B&N. Neither of them is as well-run or as reader-friendly as Fictionwise and Books on Board were (hint: shopping cart, "tell me when new books by author (x) are available", and store credits along with publisher-over-priced eBooks which could be used to buy more books).
Amazon has more than just books, so they can hang in there, but the Nook division and its former parent company are both doomed.
*sigh* Thank God for Calibre and jailbreaking!
The Nook Simple Touch (E-Ink) reader hardware is excellent and IMO way better than the E Ink Kindle. The firmware handles sideloaded epub books with ease and there's also a slot for an sdcard, something sadly lacking on the Kindle.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
Sorry couldn't resist! It's true though. They do sorta suck.
So... if it were economically possible for the Nook side of the biz to make a profit, they wouldn't need to spin it off. They publishing giant is taking a page, (pardon the pun!) from Romney's 'Bane' Capital play-book. They're spinning it off into a publicly traded company, which is going to have their LOSING e-book READER business, and probably a MASSIVE amount of debt, and all the lazy, shifty workers they can't (for one reason or another) legally fire, and they're going to keep all the good workers, (executives, mainly) and all the cash on hand, etc., and cast the Nook business adrift.
My prediction is that the Nook "spin-off" (which should be called JETTISONING,) will SINK pretty quickly, along with B&N's debt, all the losers they'd like to shit-can, and of course, the e-readers themselves. It might float for a few hours, as a seller of Galaxy Tab "Nook's" but in the end... glug glug glug!
Since some readers have web-browsing powers, all any retailer needs to do to make e-book sales is have a reader APP, or a web-based reader. You'll take careful note of how Barnes and Noble are NOT going to sell or spin-off the e-book publishing part, just the part they're getting their ASSES handed to them in.
Anyone remember when the Nook Fire, (or whatever they called that thing,) FINALLY got permission from B&N to have the Google Play Store, making it a more or less true Android tablet, instead of a lousy, short-battery-life having glorified Nook Color with an earring hole in it? Up until then it was almost useless, and by the time they added that it was too little, too late. They didn't do anything about the cheesy, custom-B&N-skin disaster on it, but hey, can't have everything, can we?
It's all going down. Consider this: Why would you pay extra for a Galaxy tab note or whatever, with a big, stupid embossed "n" on the back, when the regular one will probably be cheaper, or the B&N/Nook branded one will be lower powered, or in some other way crippled or hobbled. You don't think Samsung would sell B&N the EXACT SAME PRODUCT they're selling, give them a low enough price to sell them at so that they're the same price or cheaper, undercutting their own sales, do you? It'll either have an inferior screen, or slower processor, less memory, not be able to multi-task... or some other huge annoyance; SOMETHING to keep you from opting for the B&N one over their own. The other possibility is that it'll have the same basic specs, but come preloaded with un-deleteable B&N software, or an annoying custom UI. And... it will be more expensive. In which case, again, why would you want that?
Unless B&N decides to commit suicide by changing things so you can no longer read any B&N digital content on anything but one of THEIR devices, there's no real reason why anyone would or should prefer to have a Nook to any other more multi-purpose e-book reader.
Lemme give you a case-in-point. I had a Nook, (actually two, but that's another story) and some books I bought which I can't get money back for or exchange trivially for paper versions, or copies formatted to work with other e-book readers. I have a Kindle book (because the publisher ONLY offered it in that format) and wanted to be able to read both. Another book I needed for a class, after trying both the Kindle version, and the Barnes and Noble one, I decided to try out the iBooks (Apple's) e-reader. Of the three, the iBook version was the least annoying, the least shitty, so I bought that, returned the others, and got an iPad mini as the replacement for the useless Nook, the almost useless Amazon Nook, or Spark, or whatever they call their ad-delivery-device masquerading as an e-book reader... so now, I can read my legacy B&N e-books, my Kindle e-book, and my iBooks e-books, all on one device, and I can use iMessage, et... ALL... so that's the way I (and I'm confident a LOT of other people) went.
It's part of why I'm predicting th
Who'd a thunk it!
Now I know another stock to short.
Dumping the Nook might just save B&N. I noticed that since 2008-09, the bookstores have been dumping book inventory like crazy until there's almost nothing left. (You can almost track their book sales decline over the past few years with the inventory reduction.) This was probably so they wouldn't compete with their own Nook. So dumping the Nook off into a company that will probably be acquired in 2016 by Samsung or someone is a smart move. Now get back to selling books!
To survive, B&N needs to:
1. Have more inventory in the store for people to browse.
2. Match their online prices.
3. Have more sale-table books at a low price point to attract shoppers.
Then we'll see if people really like ordering books online instead of browsing and discovering new ones. I think B&N would enter a new golden age of printed books if they did my steps.
The sale table at B&N has become complete garbage over the past few years. They need to get back to the 2008-09 sale table that had actual books you can read, not just coffee-table books and other filler. Heck, if I was B&N I would outright buy Hamilton Books and get their inventory and access to remainders.
Back when Amazon was just a book seller, B&N was competing with them toe to toe. But then Amazon just got too big and started using it's leverage to squeeze B&N.
Amazon doesn't get nearly enough flack for it's shady business practices. In some ways they are just as bad as Google and Facebook. Amazon is slowly but surely cornering the market for eBooks. Did you know that Amazon, at any time, can shut off access to eBooks that you have bought and paid for? Did you know that it's impossible to remove a transaction after you have bought something on their website? It's there forever. The new Fire phone is taking information gathering to a new level.
B&N, on the other hand, just strikes me as more of a mom and pop bookstore. Their eBooks use a more open format. I've never really heard anything about them abusing customer data or coming up with sneaky little tricks to gather it. They just seem to want to sell you books. You can go into one of their stores and browse for hours and nobody will say anything. No pressure to buy anything.