The Inquisitr » barnes and noble

Barnes And Noble Nook eReader Kicks Off With High Demand

James Allen Johnson — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:08:44 +0000

Looking to buy a Barnes and Noble Nook eReader for yourself or possibly for a loved one at Christmas? You might want to hurry up as supplies are dwindling, so much so that pre-orders are now being taken for the first week of December when the company is expecting their second shipment of the units.

SlipperyBrick is also reporting that many Barnes and Noble customers are waiting to see the units in person at Barnes & Noble locations before deciding whether or not to buy a unit of their own, which means orders will only continue to spike as the readers reach store shelves which should be sometime before the end of November.

Order today and your $260 eReader is still scheduled to arrive by November 30th.

Spring Design Sues Barnes And Noble Over Nook Design

James Allen Johnson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:48:37 +0000

Over the last several years Spring Design claims their executives and various teams of management had met with the team at Barnes and Noble to discuss the creation of an ereader for the company. Now that the Nook is releasing in November Spring Design has filed a lawsuit that claims information used from their meetings in which an NDA was signed were implemented in the Barnes and Noble Nook.

The design in question involves the Spring Design “Alex” the companies own ereader, which, like the Nook, features two electronic ink displays with capacitive LCD touchscreen capabilities and Google Android operating systems. On the other hand the Nook won’t offer internet browsing and the screen is only used for device navigation, while the Spring Design unit is meant to act more like a “tablet PC” with various forms of content.

More info will follow as soon as the court case gets under way, although given the number of devices moving towards these exact types of technologies I don’t expect this one to get very far, even the designs look far from the same.

Amazon Begins “International Kindle” Hype Machine, Ready To Square Off Against Barnes And Noble “Nook” Ereader

James Allen Johnson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:11:04 +0000

The folks at Amazon could be getting a little nervous with the new found realization that Barnes and Noble will release their “Nook” E-reader in November. Currently the company is featuring the Kindle with International Wireless smack dab in the middle of their homepage.

The International version of the Kindle was released in the past week and features access to downloadable 3G speeds in over 100 countries including the U.S. with no additional fees or contracts to worry about. The International unit also comes in at a respectable 1/3 inches in thickness (approx.) and holds up to 1,500 books at one time.

Users can pick up the readers in two sizes, 6″ diagonal E Ink® display which offers International Wireless capabilities for $259.00 and a 9″ diagonal E Ink® screens with the later increasing book storage size to 3,500 books but only currently offered for U.S. downloads and priced significantly higher at $489.00

While both options are featured on the product page, it’s the international wireless option that’s prominently mentioned on the home page.

Barnes and Noble in the meantime will release the “Nook” E-reader in November while offering large discounts on Barnes and Noble published books that are downloaded directly to their device. Much like the Kindle the Nook will also feature” e-ink” type technology and will come equipped with a secondary screen in color which is housed on what I personally consider a much better looking overall design than the Kindle. The Nook also runs Google Android OS which has been largely hyped up over the last year.

This should be an interesting battle to witness…stay tuned.

The E-Reader’s Future

Kyle Brady — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:24:33 +0000

The latest Internet tech pundits’ obsession has not been related to the ADD-laced “real time web” proclamations that some are so annoyingly fond of, but of a much older format…

Books.

News has been slowly leaking out regarding Barnes & Noble’s “Nook” e-reader device, and the more that surfaces, the more it sounds like a surprising and wonderful device that could prove to be the harbinger of the e-reader’s/e-book’s watershed moment. It’s based on the Android platform, has a substantially better feature set than any of its predecessors, holds comparatively extreme battery life, and implements what appears to be a slick user interface.

And it’s being produced and sold by a book retailer chain.

Until now, e-readers have been something of a pipedream, since Sony’s Reader has been a nonstarter and the Amazon Kindle is inherently flawed – but all of this may quickly change. It’s intriguing that Barnes & Noble managed to understand the market’s needs so well, such as supporting a litany of formats and replicating real world book features like “sharing”, when this is something that Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) loves to claim as his own. Amazon may have cornered the market in numerous areas by using their leverage to lower prices and make deals, but they failed in the areas of digital reader rights and the all-important digital discount.

If the statistics on wholesale book sales from the International Digital Publishing Forum, which are typically half those of retail, are to be believed, e-book sales have approximately tripled within the last twelve months – the data coincides with Amazon’s entrance into the market, as expected. But with the debut of Barnes & Noble, one of two monolithic North American book retailers, as both a hardware and e-book retailer, these numbers will likely grow at an even faster rate.

Borders, Barnes & Noble’s only true competitor, has been weakly promoting the Sony Reader for years to very little effect – so what happens when one of the book giants has a product that it has invested substantial R&D in, and wants desperately to succeed? It’s highly probable that the Nook will be prominently featured in all of B&N’s locations, with slick salesmen/promoters attached, and will remain a central focus of their website for all of the foreseeable future.

When a brick-and-mortar company puts their substantial sales/promotion weight behind a product, including their $4.5 billion from in-store sales (2008), they almost always have a noticeable effect on the targeted market. Amazon is the king of product sales, but the sad fact is that a modern online powerhouse doesn’t have the marketing clout needed to push an unfamiliar item into the mainstream. However, if B&N’s power is combined with the apparent greatness of the device, a breakthrough to the masses becomes possible.

If they play their cards right, Barnes & Noble may be remembered as the company that produced the first “next generation” e-reader that was close enough to perfect for it to be popular with mainstream consumers – Amazon, Sony, and a few others will have their place as innovators, but there will be a distinction between the two. This innovation/breakthrough dichotomy is not uncommon, and can be easily found in the history of the Internet itself: the companies that were innovators (and faded/failed/went bankrupt) versus those who were able to make mainstream breakthroughs.

All of this, of course, depends on the device being more-or-less as described, not to mention functional and without any major hardware or software bugs – their success is contingent upon getting this right the first time. If they fail, they probably won’t have time for a second chance.

But I have my fingers crossed… And I already want one.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction. He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook to incinerate Kindle?

Kim LaCapria — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:15:04 +0000

A leaked WSJ ad, scheduled for Oct. 25th, has gadget bloggers buzzing about Barnes & Noble’s new e-reader, the Nook.

Running on Android, the Nook is said to be priced at Kindle’s $259 pricepoint. Many people have likened the device to a Kindle/iPhone hybrid, as unlike Kindle with a physical keyboard, the Nook has a touchscreen interface like the iPhone and iPod touch for navigating and browsing. The Nook also is rumored to support color, another advantage over Kindle. Coupled with a rumored deal for the device with Best Buy, Amazon might see their market share seriously sliding in the coming months. But the most intriguing of the rumors, in this era of gadget porn, is not even hardware related.

The first big tidbit is that books will be “heavily discounted”- without a qualifier, it’s difficult to say how impactful this aspect is. I’ve been very pleased with my iPhone Kindle app- the 6.39 pricepoint of most of the trashy vampire romances I favor is decent, but feels a bit like a jack at about a buck fifty less than the ink and paper counterparts Amazon would have to find, handle, wrap, pack, ship and of course, print on dead trees. But the even more intriguing aspect is that the Nook may allow for lending of titles between friends. One of the biggest hurdles the eBook format has in catching on is the inability to share books- the crunchy granola intellectual types that read books tend to like to pass them around between friends so they have something to discuss over soy lattes and cruelty-free hemp granola bars.

While Kindle’s got a tight grip on the e-reader market right now, the Nook sounds like it will be a powerful adversary as consumers make the leap away from analog books. Being perfectly honest, I’ve read more books in the past six weeks than I have in the past six years since downloading the Kindle app. And by December, the number of consumers using an e-reader is expected to double to 3.8 million from 1.6 million in August. Confirmation and more details are expected from B&N at 4pm EST during an event at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan.

Update: B&N.com now lists the Nook, and does a specs rundown vs. Kindle.

[Image: Gizmodo]

Barnes And Noble Book Reader Finally Revealed After Years Of Development

James Allen Johnson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:09:50 +0000

It’s been under development for years, has featured several devices of different sizes and capabilities and is about a year late to market, but at least it’s finally arriving and the Barnes and Nobles e-reader looks like a development project years in the making, evoking what compares to a combination of an iPhone mashed into an Amazon Kindle.

The unit features a black and white e-ink screen and offers the type of multi-touch gesturing found on the iPhone, while also running the Google Android OS.

Barnes and Noble have also announced that the books they sell through their own publishing company will be sold at hefty discounts in electrical form when compared to those same books in print. The reader is also slated to have access to at least some of the books scanned by the Google Books project.

The name is supposedly horrid for the device, but has yet to be revealed to the public. [More Photos: Gizmodo]

Barnes and Noble: Obama-Monkey Display Was a ‘Hate Crime’

JR — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:35:35 +0000

Barnes and Noble is repudiating recent photos showing a monkey book within one of its stores’ presidential displays. The book chain says the incident was the result of “a malicious act.”

The Barnes and Noble Obama Display

The photo (above), which has circulated widely over the Internet, shows the animal book in the middle of a Barnes and Noble window display focused on books related to Barack Obama. The misplaced book is entitled Monkeys: A Captivating Look at These Fascinating Animals.

Barnes and Noble says a customer placed the book in the display at its Coral Gables, Florida location, then snapped the photo. The company says its associates removed the book as soon as it was noticed, insisting claims that Barnes and Noble had intentionally positioned the book within the display are completely false.

“This malicious and despicable act is nothing short of a hate crime, which should be punishable under federal statutes,” Leonard Riggio, founder and chairman of Barnes and Noble, said in a statement.

Barnes and Noble E-Book Acquisition

The news comes right as Barnes and Noble is announcing new steps in its move into the e-book market. The company acquired Fictionwise for $15.7 million late last week. It intends to launch a Barnes and Noble e-bookstore later in 2009 but has indicated it will keep Fictionwise as a separate business unit, with its current team remaining in charge.

Amazon Adds Another Piece to the Puzzle

JR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:44:05 +0000

Call it the “Barnes and Noble effect” of the virtual book world: Amazon is expanding its empire by gobbling up another smaller online book operation.

Amazon has worked out a deal to acquire Shelfari, a social network built for book sharing. Shelfari doesn’t actually sell books, but rather allows users to create “virtual bookshelves” to share titles and reviews with others.

The move comes just a few weeks after Amazon announced the acquisition of AbeBooks, an independent used and out-of-print bookseller. Things get a little dicey there, as AbeBooks owned a stake in LibraryThing — a competitor to Shelfari. Amazon appears poised to pour its resources into Shelfari, so yet to be seen is what will happen to LibraryThing as a result.

So why call it the “Barnes and Noble effect”? It’s simple: Cities used to be full of small, locally-owned bookstores. Then came the big Barnes and Noble stores, filled with every book imaginable and so much more. Now, you’re hard-pressed to find one independent mom-and-pop bookstore in most communities — at least, that’s been my experience in the couple of cities I’ve lived in since that era. Not to say it’s all bad — Barnes and Noble and the comparable competitors are great stores and I certainly frequent and enjoy them — but it’s still sad to see so many of the smaller, locally-owned stores disappear, unable to keep up with the corporate competition.

At least in this case, Amazon seems to be keeping the smaller entities running as their own standalone operations…so even if they’re losing the independent spirit, they’re not vanishing altogether. Maybe in these instances, they’ll even get stronger as a result.

Shelfari

Amazon

eBay Moving Away From Auctions

JR — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:35:55 +0000

eBay is tinkering with the very core of its business model. The company is planning to start focusing more on its fixed-price sales as opposed to its auction-oriented sales. The shift is expected to be announced sometime today, The New York Times says.

The change, of course, positions the site right in line with straight-forward Web retailers ranging from Amazon to Barnes and Noble or Borders. And it’s no surprise: eBay’s auction sales have been underperforming compared to the fixed-price alternative, The Times reports, meaning the auction boom of eBay’s early days may be reaching its end.

The specific changes will include lower upfront fees to encourage sellers to put their stuff online for a fixed price. Such a sale will only cost $0.35 for a month-long listing as of next month — a huge drop, almost 70 percent, from the current fee.

ebay