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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.
Whew! For a second there I thought you were going to say "M".
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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!
Other people have been trained to consider their free time to have no value. There is nothing I could possibly want to buy a a B&N that could provide enough discount to offset the the time I would spend getting there.
I have both, and the Kindle has an easy of use about it that more flexible Nook cannot match.
Easy of use can be much more important than most geeks think.
Just because other people do things with their free time that you don't personally value doesn't mean that they don't value it. Some people just enjoy browsing in bookstores.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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?
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.