Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
techcrunch.com
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Two things make me think they will.
1. They recently made a deal with Appcelerator to favor apps built using those tools and to provide more support for those developers (for those who don't know Appcelerator allows you to write iPhone and Android apps with web tools like RoR, Python, Javascript, CSS, etc...)
2. They are offering support in all B&N stores.
So they're being developer friendly to get more apps created (as opposed to Amazon where you have to give them permission to give your app away just to get in their store). And they're working to draw in casual users.
To my eyes that makes the Nook Tablet a very attractive offering both for consumers to buy and developers to build on.
Some folks are of the opinion that Amazon will wipe the floor with B&N, but I think B&N aren't going to give up easily.
Amazon's customer service is, quite frankly, better than almost any brick and mortar store's customer service. And I don't even have to leave my home.
It's an interesting play on B&N's part, and I don't really see how it can play out well for them. They've more or less acknowledged that the future of almost all of their wares is digital. Can the expense of running brick and mortar stores for customer service possibly be worth the added cost to the customer? Seems doubtful.
I just returned an unopened item. I just printed the label, put it back in the original shipping box and left it on the porch for the mail carrier to pick up.
This isn't documented, but it's how things have always worked for me. Sometimes my request is "the item in the description is not the item I've received" and I eventually give up after receiving the same wrong item 4 times. That's how ingrained the process is; they don't read my email, they just mail me a replacement. Oh well.
Increase the size of the coffee area, have stand-up promotional materials for new releases, figure out some digital equivalent of autographed copies so that authors can continue to have readings, etc.
Barnes & Noble, your neighborhood salon.
> ... I don't really see how it can play out well for them.
> Can the expense of running brick and mortar stores for
> customer service possibly be worth the added cost to
> the customer? Seems doubtful.
Combined with free wifi, books that can be browsed, in store returns, they've possibly got a chance.
Will it convert me? No, I'm a Prime user with some positive AMZN customer service experiences under my belt. So, maybe B &N needs to do more courting of the tech crowd.
In any event, the timing on this announcement is pretty good. I was already sold on the Kindle Fire but I didn't do the pre-order thing. Now B&N has put me in "wait to see the reviews" mode at least.
Kindle Fire: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/28/amazon-kindle-fire-impres...
Nook Tablet: http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/07/barnes-and-nobles-nook-ta...
I want to know what the interface looks like, because the interface videos I've seen on the Fire look pretty stellar. If the Tablet can't match the Fire, then all the hardware specs in the world won't make it appealing to me.
I work part-time at a B&N, which doesn't really give me any info that you guys don't have, but I am sure that they are dedicated to this course. Nook sales are an increasing part of store and company sales.
Some things I don't care for is that, at least at my store, they have reduced the amount of books we have in stock and there is talk of getting rid of our music/DVD department. It often seems to me, especially since we sell Nooks at other resellers, that B&N management could be laying the groundwork for leaving brick and mortar stores behind.
But they launched it with no 3rd-party apps, so instead it appeared on the market as merely a "color e-reader" - something that costs more and has less battery life, all in the service of a color screen that mostly only provides a tangibly better experience for a subset of periodicals. But nobody really reads The Economist for the pictures, and People subscribers probably aren't big players in the target demographic.
They did later bring out an app market. But it was months late and anemic; not the kind of thing that was likely to turn many heads. And they didn't push that idea hard. So Amazon comes along and does, and I fear that from here out anything that B&N could possibly do will be too little, too late.
Given that this market exists, and is being actively courted by every player in this field, B&N will NEED to sort out global distribution somehow, otherwise they will get crushed. Unless of course they believe a good run in the American market alone will give them enough momentum to launch in Europe whenever they see fit... and that's probably not going to happen.
They're doing this already. People with Nooks make follow-on purchases too.
Over the past couple of years, I've seen B&N upgrade their tech and product teams and lay the groundwork for a future where they - like Amazon - have no physical locations but offer far more than books over the web, and make much of their money through the sale of digital goods.
I'm skeptical they'll catch up with Amazon, but when the actual physical bookstore is a quaint and obscure relic, I think they'll still be trucking along quite nicely. The company's already massively undervalued given their share of the ebook market.
In other words, Amazon is actively predating on retail markets left and right, to the extent of relegating them to display models for their own merchandise. Media consumption is a big recent play, but they're moving forward on killing traditional retail, too.
Meanwhile, B&N is making competent moves in the struggle to survive. It seems almost noble in its futility.
I'm old enough to remember when checking out of a book store often involved a short conversation about books rather than a "No Thanks" to a Godaddy like gauntlet of magazine subscription offers and membership cards coupled with watching another human being humiliate theirself.
Sorry but I don't care if B&N puts tits in the box with their tablet, I have no love for the brand.