Barnes & Noble is in this space too, and they have hundreds of stores that will serve as points-of-sale for the Nook. Don't forget them.
EDIT: apologies to the European HNers. Still, those B&M stores in America are incredibly popular, making it easier for Barnes & Noble to find new Nook users.
They're actually an albatross. Ask Borders how popular physical book stores are. B&N is only still alive because of its digital business. Barely alive too, Amazon is 150x larger in terms of market cap. Digital sales are up, physical sales are down and at the end of the quarter they are losing a lot of money.
The Kindle line is sold in Target. I'd wager Targets are more popular and will be around longer than B&N. Even better, it doesn't cost Amazon a dime to keep Target stores open.
Since vendors often pay retailers for prime shelf space, Amazon might in fact contribute to keeping Target stores open. Still, I get what you mean.
However, B&N's main advantage compared to Amazon is its network of B&M stores, right? Now, the bet here is "let's lose money on the tablet, and hope that people buy tons of ebooks".
I'd guess that people for whom the existence of B&M stores is important aren't going to be the biggest ebook buyers: they'll be more into dead tree books, on average. If B&N subsidizes their Nook, and it's only used as a web browser, B&N has lost.
Bad idea. I saved about $75, but had to deal with billing errors, cancellation of part of my order, slow and overpriced shipping, and that cost me several hours of my valuable time. I was astonished at how poor the experience was.
This is after wondering why I could order books from Amazon and they arrived 9am the next day (the joys of living in a teeny country like the UK :P) but when I ordered X other thing from different sites it took days, and was full of mistakes.
Amazon have absolutely nailed the shipping side of online retail - which is usually what people most complain about in retailers, after all!
I can't imagine living my life without it. Seriously.
States do have a right to tax their individual citizens who purchase online. Unfortunately, most citizens do not comply with these state taxes (called "use taxes" because they aren't on a sale, the sale occurs out-of-state).
Seriously though, do Barnes and Noble actually sell the Nook to international customers? They certainly don't market it over here, while Amazon have run quite a lot of TV and print ads. Buy the look of it I'd have to buy the device and books in US dollars instead of my local currency. These things don't give me the feeling that B&N are serious about sales outside the US, while Amazon definitely are.
What's this Nook thing you're talking about?
I've seen Kindles in Wal-marts and Targets recently.