Barnes & Noble Has Been Quietly Refreshing Its Nook Hardware (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: Peter Smith writes that he 'had more or less written off the Nook when Barnes & Noble farmed hardware duties out to Samsung.' But now that Amazon is aiming for the low end with its downgraded Fire tablet line, Barnes & Noble has an opportunity to 'carve out a niche on the higher end of things,' says Smith. And so it has been quietly moving in that direction. Yesterday, Venture Beat wrote about the newly (and stealthily) launched $250 Samsung Galaxy Tab E Nook. As Smith notes, 'the specs for this new tablet aren't anything special,' which might explain the stealthy launch, except that another, pricier Nook tablet apparently came out a month ago (again, according to VentureBeat), the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 Nook.

Comments

I never had a problem with their hardware

[taustin]

I gave up on B&N when they became actively hostile to their own users. Removing download links for epubs, playing games to keep you from getting it any other way, changing from their "social encryption" to randomly generated keys, all for the specific purpose of making it impossible to keep an archive of your purchases, so that you have to rely on B&N to reload stuff if you replace a device (and you can only do so on their devices, or using their reader). All while losing hundreds of millions of dollars, and looking like their were going out of business any day now. Fuck 'em.

I hate Amazon's business model on ebooks, but it's still better than B&N shitting all over me.

Re:I never had a problem with their hardware

[Obfuscant]

If you have an Android tablet, get the Nook app. I don't think they can hide the files then.

Bzzzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing the DRM game brought to you by Barnes & Noble, fine booksellers.

Sorry, that's just how really pathetic B&N are at customer relations. The latest Nook app for Android does not keep the content as files anywhere the normal user can find them. It keeps them IN THE APP. Yes, truly, when I updated to the latest app, the app grew to 150MB in size and the files for each book or magazine that were in someplace I could get them were gone. Vanished.

Not only that, but IIRC I picked up FOUR services running all the time, to replace the previous one service.

I don't recall the specifics because I immediately removed that version of the app and searched my backups for a copy of the previous version. That one does have content files, but they have meaningless names so you cannot look for any book by its name. If you're trying to get your most recent content into Calibre so you can use it somewhere else, you have to look by creation date on the file.

And, of course, they changed the DRM system to try to keep people from getting to their stuff anyway, but shouts to the people writing the import filters for Calibre.

Besides the downside of meaningless names for content files, the "previous" app has the amazing ability to keep turning on the "Show Notifications" flag for itself. I go into Settings/Applications and keep turning it off, and every time B&N wants me to know about a special deal it gets turned back on so I get the icon in the notification area.

Wot no Eink?

[Anne Thwacks]

If it does not have eink and a battery life in months, surely it is not actually an eBook? Its just an also-ran tablet with an app. I have one of those already.

I am a nerd.

I want a black and white screen 1280x1024, with a physical keyboard and some type of navigation.

Sure I could use it to read "catch 22", but the real world use is to have all the service manuals and wiring diagrams where I can take them on site and use them. paper ones need a couple of drawing cabinets (bigger than 4-draw filing cabinets), and colour displays time out just when you are managing to finally figure out whether it was the blue/green wire or the green/blue wire that deactivates the detonator.

Re:Wot no Eink?

[iampiti]

I'm sure you're aware of larger eink based ereaders. There're some with 9,7 inch screens and those are pretty nice for information-dense PDFs. They're something like 1200x800 in resolution, and their size it's still too small to read dense A4 PDFs, but they're certainly much better than the 6 inch readers.
I have an Onyx M92 and it supports a nice number of formats (EPUB, PDF, cbz, even Excel and Word) but that's old and I'm sure there're much better models by now.

Color E-Ink?

[camperdave]

Is it waterproof, color, full-sunlight readable, rapid transition, low power, e-ink technology? Or is it simply some crippled tablet?

I hope they do and suceed

[btroy]

Having used various models of the Nook (Eink (1st nook, nook touch), Tablet, HD, HD+), I love their stuff. The first edition of Samsung devices (larger screen ones) were a down step from the HD+ which was simply beautiful.. You talk about lock in, etc. The device was built for average folks (not us geeks that frequent this site). I've watched my wife and kids use the devices and frankly, for the target market of readers and tablet games, etc. The devices have been great. I personally use a Nook Touch and HD. They do their job well. The screen on the HD is nice, the latest high-end tablets are exceeding it now, but still for most cases it is beautiful. Regarding of the hiding and DRM. Well they have to protect their contracts with the book companies as well. I don't like it, but I understand the nature of it.