Digital ‘War and Peace’ for Nook Falls Victim to Embarrassing Copy-and-Paste Gaffe

Nook hasn’t done too badly in the notoriously hard-to-crack eReader market, but it’s no secret that Amazon’s competing Kindle is the McDonald’s to Barnes and Noble’s Burger King, the Coke to its Pepsi, or the Nicki Minaj to the online retailer’s Lil Kim.

There’s always a company that gets in and locks down the market with an innovative product (like iPods), and Barnes and Noble has had to wrestle every wedge of market share it possesses from dominator Amazon in the eBook marketplace. So can you blame them for being a bit touchy about the word “Kindle?”

Of course, this managed to play out in an utterly humiliating fashion for Barnes and Noble in a very notable book, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” An intrepid blogger noticed and publicized the embarrassing error, where the word “kindled,” (not an entirely uncommon one) had been replaced with the nonsensical “Nookd.” And of course, this prompted a bit of digging, first by the blogger, and then by larger tech sources, including Ars Technica.

Comparing the two side-by-side, the blogger found that in at least eight instances, the word “kindle” or a variant thereof in the text had been changed to the out-of-context “Nook” or similar.

It seems pretty clear that the now red-faced editor adapted a version of “War and Peace” that had some attribution to Amazon’s Kindle somewhere in the text, and used a “find and replace” function to root out the errant mentions of the rival device- however, he or she did not count upon organic usage of the word drawing way more attention to the Nook vs. Kindle rivalry.