Goodbye-Barnes-and-Noble | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye-Barnes-and-Noble

keithp.com

106 pointsedward76 comments

The author's complaint was confusing to me because it didn't have enough context.

This is a better article:

http://www.teleread.com/drm/barnes-noble-removes-ability-to-...

The author's article didn't mention "Nook" or "Nook ecosystem" which is crucial to inferring the motivations of B&N (and also the publishers) to remove the Download button. Without that context, it just looks like a random policy change that inadvertently irritated customers.

In other words, I care more about

1) the "big picture" behind removing that download button

rather than

2) the author's personal decision to stop buying ebooks from them

As a reader, I can conclude #2 from #1. But I can't figure out #1 from #2 unless I find another article such as the one I added.

You make a good point about clarity in writing, but don't forget you may not have been the intended audience. People don't write these posts always expecting them to go to #2 on HN.

I've done work in ebooks and it was easy for me to infer #1 from what he said, and hastily conclude that BN is dropping its one real competitive advantage over AMZN. If they stick to this, they're giving up aiming for #1, and accepting a perpetual "minor player" spot.

No surprise. The pedantic nature of your complaint is common on HN.

I found the post to be perfectly clear. Perhaps you are looking for more information, and found it elsewhere, but it doesn't affect the quality of the post at all.

In my day, posts like yours would be considered'trolling'. If you have complaints with the article, communicate with the author. Why subject everyone to your random complaints?

This is unfair. Your parent's link was useful to me, and the rest of the post was context for why it was needed. Although I suppose it could have just said "I found this other article useful as background" and been a bit less pedantic.

>If you have complaints with the article, communicate with the author.

Complaining to the author isn't necessary because he may have thought the context was obvious -- especially to his keithp.com readers and also some HN readers such as you.

I read HN articles every day and yet, I didn't have enough background to connect the dots. I didn't know B&N had a download button. My amazon ebooks account doesn't have that. I had no mental picture to understand what this download button was about.

>Why subject everyone to your random complaints?

I took extra steps to understand why things played out the way they did to force the author away from B&N. I thought it would be helpful to inform other HN readers of the link I read to gain that understanding. Isn't the comments section to be used to discuss/clarify/disagree with the article?

> I read HN articles every day and yet, I didn't have enough background to connect the dots. I didn't know B&N had a download button. My amazon ebooks account doesn't have that. I had no mental picture to understand what this download button was about.

I agree, because I've never purchased from B&N before, I didn't have that context available either to fully appreciate the author's point. Hence why your link was useful to me as well.

That's not to say the original article was without interest. It was, but superficially, (to me) it seemed like a disaffected customer upset with a UI change/removal (which is understandable).

It was unintelligible for me, and the link posted by your 'troll' enabled me to understand what it was trying to say.

>Why subject everyone to your random complaints?

Pot (with throwaway account), meet kettle.

Why does the "big picture" matter in this case? This is an unfortunately all-too-common story: a company makes an ill-thought-out and obnoxious policy change with no regard to how it impacts normal people.

That is always outrage-worthy.

Thank you for putting this out there.

I opened the nook app after reading this and promptly downloaded some old books, I then came back and read the comments to understand what the story was actually about. I had never actually used the website to download the ebooks so I was unaware that feature existed.

If you download nook for PC/mac, the .epub files are readily accessible after you use the in-app download feature, and considering the author is already using Adobe Digital Editions under WINE, I'd assume the author can just as easily download use the nook pc app. The complaint seems valid to me, I just don't think it's worth leaving $500+ of books (assuming the author is stating they can no longer access books due to the removal of downloading via the web).

the author isn't leaving any books. he'd previously downloaded everything purchased and asked for a refund for the one book he could no longer download.

It's funny, but whenever I run into weird DRM restrictions, I tend to switch to piracy. When I had no income, I never would have bought, and while I did pirate, no sales were lost. Now that I have income, I don't mind buying. But if buying is sufficiently more cumbersome, I do sometimes go back to piracy.

I'd love to see a proper market study on this. As far as I can tell, all of this is based on ego and executives' knee-jerk reactions.

That's the big draw of piracy for me as well - not that I can get out of paying for stuff, but that it's easier (by a mile) than trying to get it the legitimate way. Example: a few weeks ago, I wanted to catch up on The Strain before that night's episode. Went online to try to find a legitimate way to watch it, got blocked because my cable provider (Charter) wasn't on the list of blessed providers. Same story at Hulu. I wanted to watch it, and watch the ads, so they could get their revenue, because that's how the economy works. But they wouldn't let me, so I turned to PB and, after <5 minutes, had the full episode ready to watch with 0 advertisements.

Piracy will continue until there's an easier way to acquire and own content.

Interestingly, some technologies have made me take the opposite route. Now that I have chromecast, I find it more convenient to buy a movie on Google and cast it rather than pirate it and watch on a laptop.

Of course, you can open the video in a chrome tab and cast that, but I've found that's not as smooth. And nothing beats the convenience of a simple touch :)

But if buying is sufficiently more cumbersome, I do sometimes go back to piracy.

Even after I've bought films/series, I tend to pirate them because it's faster than getting the DvDs out and switching them every 4 episodes etc if just watching on my computer. I continue to thank everyone and anyone who does the service of ripping disks

And the freaking FBI warning at the beginning of the disc, and then with some publishers (Disney, you're the worst offender) forcing me to sit through ads every time I put in the disc.

It's like you're being punished for being honest.

The opposite is also true. In college most people got their music from places like audiogalaxy because that was really the only good option. Now most people I know just use the iTunes store because it is so simple.

> When I had no income, I never would have bought, and while I did pirate, no sales were lost.

Did you go back and pay for everything you pirated once you had income? If piracy weren't an option, maybe your demand for the products would have persisted and you would have bought them when you could. If so, sales were lost.

> But if buying is sufficiently more cumbersome, I do sometimes go back to piracy. I'd love to see a proper market study on this. As far as I can tell, all of this is based on ego and executives' knee-jerk reactions.

Interesting that you use the word "ego." You decided that your desire for content delivered on your own turns outweighed the interests of the content creators (or their agents) to determine how their work would be distributed. That strikes me as egotistical.

If you believe that all information should be free and that creators/owners of information should have no say in how it's distributed, none of these arguments apply. Tangentially, if this is the case, you might find your philosophy uncomfortably close to that of the NSA.

I like not having to make room for all of my books in my house, but when you can't access the book you bought, that kind of makes the whole thing not work. I have bought hundreds of ebooks, but I still am uncomfortable with not really owning them. I de-drm my books so B&N can't just take them back (without a refund) whenever they feel like it, but it sucks that you have to break the rules just to have any rights to your own purchases.

On another note, I like to go to B&N to browse and just hang out. The last time I was there, the coffee shop lady hassled me. It was a very unpleasant experience. I heard from a friend of mine that she had the same experience. Apparently, if they see you there and not spending enough money, they start harassing you. Ironically, I was in the process of buying a book on my laptop when she came by to inform me that I needed to make a purchase if I wanted to keep using the internet there. Were they going to kick me out if I didn't buy coffee? I was only there for my lunch break, so I never found out. I think in the future, I'll just go to Starbucks where they still leave me in peace.

>The last time I was there, the coffee shop lady hassled me. It was a very unpleasant experience. I heard from a friend of mine that she had the same experience. Apparently, if they see you there and not spending enough money, they start harassing you.

I'll take "Things that will make me spend even less money in that store" for $800, Alex.

Between this and shuttering DRM based services after promising you can buy the tracks you love, etc... I really have to wonder why companies haven't stopped and asked themselves why what they are doing isn't working.

Nah, it can't be us, they'll think... so let's double down on the restrictions, pressure selling tactics and blame the dirty pirates when our bottom line continues to slip.

Meanwhile, those dirty pirates aren't dealing with any of this bullshit.

"those dirty pirates"

There is an interesting analogy between "dirty pirates" and teens in malls.

Pretty much everyone younger than myself has had the experience of mall security severely hassling them as a teen or even as a young adult, pretty much just because their rentacops have a license to be jerks. Well, here I am a rather well paid dude with fat stacks of cash, but the mall doesn't want my type there, so it never even appears on the radar anymore. Malls are dead to anyone younger than perhaps 40. Not surprisingly they're generally not doing so well financially. Lots of dead / dying malls across the country.

If a company hates their primary and future customers enough, eventually those customers WILL go away permanently.

With B+N it might be location based or racial harassment etc because my screaming little kids (is there any other kind?) and I shop there and they don't mess with me. Then again I pass for a non-minority middle aged reasonably well dressed middle class dude. I suspect that is the key to their unwritten harassment policies.

"the mall doesn't want my type there"

What happens when you go to the mall? What type are you? I sometimes visited malls while under 40 and I never got hassled, so I'm curious.

What I'm getting at is perhaps 20 years ago there was hysteria about teens in malls being disruptive / troublemakers therefore rentacops to chase them away so the financially valuable moms and dads can shop in peace and comfort. I knew about the crackdown so I never even bothered going to the mall as a teen. As a young adult at lunch hour at my first real job, a business formal suit and tie establishment, I bought some nice expensive clothes, walking thru the mall to my car after obviously shopping at my lunch (I took off the sports coat of my business suit) and got severely hassled by a rentacop about what I'm doing there and where are my parents, etc. Pretty much like I heard they treat teens except they didn't call the cops and issue a loitering ticket to me. Never went back there again.

The long term problem with treating teens like dirt, is they eventually grow up into adults some of which have fat stacks of cash and would make fantastic customers, however there's no way in hell they're ever going back to that place again.

It appears mall security was very effective there. Nothing left in there but urbanware clothing, tennis shoes, cell phones, and really cheap jewelry left. Its not that the neighborhood has done downhill, can't count how many million dollar condos within a mile.

" I really have to wonder why companies haven't stopped and asked themselves why what they are doing isn't working."

That's the problem. These are the conclusions they're reaching after they ask that question - which hints that they're having problems before enacting these policies, which lead to these policies. (Which will only make things worse...)

That must be one really dumb employee at your particular store. I use their Internet without making purchases for hours at a time pretty often and no one says a word to me. I buy a good bit of stuff from there on other occasions, so I don't feel bad about it, but I've never been hassled or anything by their coffee shop folks.

I'd report them to their manager if I were you. They're costing the store money.

My experience with that tactic has been that if every seat is full (e.g. Saturday at 11 am in a university town), and a paying customer with no seat complains there are obviously non-paying students reading books clearly not from B$N, then they'll ask the person least likely to fuss to move.

Indeed. Most of the Cafe areas in B&N's have a specific sign that the seating is for those buying food and coffee. Typically there is seating elsewhere in the store for just sitting and reading. If the Cafe area is full, and you are not buying, or have not bought food or coffee, you are preventing them from selling it.

Of note from the blog:

This ensured that my books would be available even when I didn't have a network connection (as happened yesterday during a wind storm which cut the power to the DSLAM which connects me to the internet).

The thought of being unable to read a purchased ebook on the seller's reader just because I don't have an internet connection is preposterous. I'm most likely to read ebooks exactly when I _don't_!

You can immediately sync it to your device when you purchase. But of course that requires you remembering to do it. Annoying, but if you're online to purchase you can sync to device then as well.

I'm not sure there's a way for B&N to revoke titles either. The DRM seems to just be keyed off of Name and Credit Card Number. I may be a minority, but I have several hundred titles that fit with room to spare on one of the later gen Nooks. Now as far as getting an actual file.... Maybe you'll just have to get a first gen Nook. Surely the desktop application stores an epub locally at some point though?

I actually bought a few books at B&N just now. I enjoy the experience of browsing and being able to flip through a book before actually buying it. Is it worth paying 50% (in this case) more than Amazon? I don't know, but I would prefer that real bookstores exist for at least a little longer.

Of course, while paying, I had to say no three separate times to joining whatever club or credit card they try to pressure you into, thus completely ruining an otherwise pleasant experience and making me question why I ever go there anymore.

Barnes & Noble is missing the biggest opportunity in ebook sales. They do little to nothing to show the ebook value to shoppers visiting the store with the purpose of buying a book.

The physical store has limited space for books, so they only have the newest and most popular. BN needs to stock the self with paper leaflets of 2nd and 3rd tier books that could be bought in the online store. The leaflet could contain a QR code so shoppers could buy the book right then using their phone.

This would expose more people to the online ebook store and draw them into titles that BN can't stock physically. They could even give them a "free" first book to incentivize people into signing up. Educate the staff to help non-technical shoppers sign-up and get their book.

The overall experience would be to teach people how to use the nook app to buy books. Once people are comfortable with the process they will be apt to buy more books through the app.

Contrast Amazon's standard bonus of giving you .MP3s of an album if you buy the CD, and the growing number of movies sold as DVD/BD and digital bundle. Fond of both the convenience of digital media and the objective ownership of physical media, one of the minor but real hinderances I've had in buying books is having to choose the medium - let me pay a buck or two more and get both formats.

This is a great idea! Have you told B&N about it?

Sort of tangential, but my first job was working in a Barnes & Noble, and it's still the one I miss the most. More than that, while I do believe electronic distribution is both more ecologically rational and practically efficient, I'm one of those people who was raised on physical books as an avid reader... and there really is something very significant lost without that tactile experience.

I suppose it's positive that more and more people will grow up without that, so we can cut down on the number of trees we cut down, but it's still sad in a way to see that experience going away. The feel (and even sound and smell, in some cases) of a book can be very intimate.

I'm with you on the tactile experience. I read a lot and have tons of books piling up around my condo. I've bought multiple e-readers and have an iPad but whenever I try to use them to replace physical books I just can't do it. For me holding a physical book, getting to flip through the pages, the feel of it, there's just something about it I've come to love and I'm not sure exactly what or why.

I like both approaches, because they offer different advantages. I tend to like reading physical books in natural lighting and mostly fiction. Like today, frosty morning with clear blue sky when sun comes through a window and illuminates the room I can't resist lay on the couch and read some physical fiction book in calm environment, it's quite pleasing. On the other hand, reading from ebook/tablet/desktop gives more interactive capabilities, I can get translation of some words, create bookmark, I can do search within book or on the internet etc., so it's more convenient for technical stuff or when I'm trying to improve language skills. So both ways are interesting, and I sure hope physical books won't die out.

Agreed, it is very much an internal conflict of mine. On one hand, I love all the things about physical books that you listed. On the other hand, I love being able to put my kindle in my pocket and have my "library" with me.

For me the tactile experience is incredibly important, especially as a software engineer that stares at a screen most of the day. Experiencing an object on more than just one level is something I think we've lost a lot of. Reading a substantial book electronically has almost no appeal to me and I love to read.

People learn in different ways, and I remember reading, perhaps in [Pragmatic Thinking and Learning](https://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learn...), that your tactile sense is as important for learning as your visual and aural senses, and so on.

I like the smell of books, too.

I doubt tactility (from a learning perspective) really comes into play while reading a book, as opposed to on a screen. That's not to denigrate paper book reading as an enjoyable experience, but let's not go overboard :)

The effect's subtle. I read Wycoff's Mindmapping in high school, and have tried the techniques off and on. One interesting idea is that you're constantly making background connections, and these can play a small but non-negligible association in the mind. So if you always chew a minty gum when doing your math work, it helps a bit in bootstrapping you back into that frame of mind later, like smelling bacon sizzling and feeling restful from associating it with family breakfasts.

Whether it works or not, well, I think it does, but it's no panacea. I prefer to think of it as a hint to start preloading a frame of mind (like the Jargon File's second use of 'swap' [0]). When I sit with a second hand book that's got that mild musty wood and glue smell, it gets me in the frame of mind to read. YMMV.

[0] https://www.catb.com/jargon/html/S/swap.html

For me it's a matter of quickly referencing material. For whatever reason, I seem to recall where things are roughly by the thickness of the stack of pages. The percentage bar on the Kindle doesn't replicate that. And flipping between pages on a device just takes too long. So, I have a hard time reading any sort of reference material on a Kindle.

Why not search for some keyword?

It's never as fast and document search on e-readers seems to be straight word match rather than any form of intelligent indexing. If I don't recall where something is, it's almost always faster to use the book's index than it is to naively search through the doc, in my experience.

I tried ebooks for a few months, a few years ago. What killed it for me is I can't lend them out. I often read a book and recommend it to a friend, and even hand them the book to read if they happen to be at my house. Even just for those few months, this happened often enough to be a pain. So I stopped and went back to buying physical books.

I suppose e-readers are more useful for people who read _lots_ of books. I read maybe a dozen fiction novels per year. If I read at two or three times that rate, I can see managing a physical collection becoming too much of a hassle.

"What killed it for me is I can't lend them out."

Also, gifts.

In the future it seems likely that books you buy for yourself will be ebooks and books you get as a gift from someone, as an interior decoration, will be physical books. This has some pretty big implications for brick and mortar layout and design. If you segment the gift marketplace aggressively enough you probably don't need as many physical books, bookstores could end up being very small stores rather than the trend toward library sized palaces.

Same here. B&N is "my" bookstore but I only buy eBooks to read on the plane. Lending and borrowing books is nice way of connecting with friends. You can technically loan (some) ebooks in the Nook ecosystem - but only for 2 weeks and you have to add them to your "group" or something.

The shackles that digital purchases bind you with make me resist buying digital whenever possible. Subscription services, like Netflix, are a whole different, and interesting, beast.

There will always be a place for physical books, but that place is going to be tend to be as more of a luxury good or for items that really lend themselves to the paper medium.

I'm in the same boat, or perhaps more extreme (I have about 2000 physical books). One of the things I don't like about ebooks is just plain usability. Almost everything I read is technical in nature, and I like to take margin notes, cross reference things within and between books, and generally add to the content and organization of the book as I read it. I rarely have a need to search for text, and if I do I can generally find it quickly because of my notes and just the memory of where it was in the book.

I've only tried a small number of ebook readers, but nothing has even come close to the usability of paper books for me doing that kind of stuff. A book that I'm going to study has to be paper, for now.

I've been restricting what stores I purchase ebooks from because of DRM. Fiction from Baen and Dragonmount, CS from O'Reilly, etc.. I've been thinking of building a book scanner to make my physical collection more portable.

Interestingly, I have no problem buying games on Steam, though many are via GOG and Humble, where I can still download a copy too.

Bear in mind not all Steam games come with DRM. It is required for things like the Steam marketplace though, which can often add a lot to the game.

Kerbal Space Program was quite reluctant to launch on Steam as they didn't want to add the DRM, once they found it wasn't required (or Steam relaxed the rules) they did so and now sell it there and on their own store.

> After I got home, I had to figure out how to get Adobe Digital Editions installed on my laptop

Don't.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/adobe-spyware-reveals-...

I recommend using Google's Play Books, which you can read on your PC from this link, after you upload them (preferably epubs):

https://play.google.com/books

I actually prefer it, too. It looks nicer, and you can sync them with your Android devices, too.

I'm a little confused - if you purchase an ebook, but aren't allowed to download it, how are you meant to read it?

You are meant to use one of their sanctioned devices. Those devices connect to their servers, do some arcane handshake and receive a copy of the book.

That's insane. You might as well buy real books! That's just as arcane

Roughly the same way the original author did:

"Having purchased a Kobo Aura, it had built-in access to their book store, which made it easy to download the book that I wanted. Then, I simply connected my reader to my laptop and copied the file over for safe keeping."

I haven't purchased ebooks through Barnes and Noble, but I understand how annoying it can be getting all the ebook stores/ecosystems/formats/devices to play nice with each other. It was the reason I continued to buy paper books up until recently.

My solution: buy your ebook in any store that allows downloads (Amazon, Google, Kobo), and import into Calibre. Change settings to automatically convert imported ebooks to .epub format if they aren't already (the DRM-stripping plugin is optional ;-)). Set your library folder to dropbox, and voila, you have unfettered access from anywhere (and transferring to your Kobo Aura is easy too).

Yep, this is exactly what I've been doing for years. Using Dropbox as Calibre's library folder is awesome...gives me instant access to all my books from just about any device.

This is exactly what I've been doing and it works fine for me. Like you, I just buy from wherever sells.

By stopping downloads, they're obviously trying to stop piracy, but if other companies follow suit, surely there will be technical solution found sooner or later. Maybe they're just trying to do as much as they can.

Perhaps they don't know that those of us who download and strip DRM aren't necessarily pirates - just looking after own own (legally purchased) books in a system that we prefer?

As long as there are multiple sources where you can download your paid-for ebook, this decision by B&N will accomplish nothing, other than killing potential sales to people like us.

I don't mind paying $10 for an ebook. I just want a good user experience. This means no DRM and full control of the content.

Remember, when you pay money for ebooks with DRM, you are only leasing them, not buying them.

https://twitter.com/evmcl/status/261661956681908225/photo/1

http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/

http://the-digital-reader.com/2012/10/23/kobo-says-youre-no-...

https://twitter.com/librarythingtim/status/14262859728958259...

In the end we shall have: Walled gardens - kindle, nook, etc... Regular Printed books Free stuff

The free stuff will consist of: Books with expired copyright - Project Gutenberg Books that authors decided to give away for various reasons Illegal copies of stuff

The illegal copies are the reason for the walled gardens of course. This unfortunately doesn't help the blogger who wants to transfer his stuff to different devices, but that's the problem with DRM.

Anyone selling non-DRM books is likely not to be as profitable, will not get big names in their catalog, and will either fail or stay second rate.

Meanwhile, B&N stores are full of people. IMHO they would have to screw up badly to go out of business in the next few years. ebooks just aren't that great from a business perspective.

The thing that kills me about Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Borders, etc. is how they are slowly expanding the toy section of the stores. It's pretty much gotten to the point where they are stocking so few books I want, there is no point in making the trip. I would go in hopes of getting the book now instead of waiting a couple days for shipping.

Every-time they said, "Sorry sir, we don't have that book in stock, but we can order it for you" I would excuse myself from the conversation, load up the amazon app while walking, and have it ordered before I had my car door open.

Open Letter to B&N - http://tenletters.org/

So, I wrote this open letter to B&N about a 2 weeks ago and just haven't gotten around to posting it yet. I was waiting until I managed to track down the e-mail addresses of some of the big wigs, but since this seems relevant I'll post it here as well. Once I've gotten the e-mails out to B&N I'm going to submit this on here as well as a couple other places.

I made it through almost three paragraphs of that. I expect your target audience will make it through much less. You may want to condense this before you send it out.

The nice phrase for tl;dr is "executive summary" because big wigs don't need to bother with ill-written text.

Thanks for the advice.

I've been thinking about sending them a letter as well. I spend a lot of money at B&N, but some of their recent actions have really annoyed me, and bn.com has sucked donkey balls for far too long. I don't know if one letter from a long-time customer will influence anybody or not, but I feel compelled to at least make the effort.

Once you've identified a list of emails of people to send to, do you mind sharing? If not with the world, would you consider sending me an email at least? No sense duplicating effort and all...

Sure, I've been looking around at the corporate info. It looks like most of the emails follow the convention of first initial + last name @ bn.com. I figured I'd start with the list of board members and such and just try to hit everyone I can. I'll follow up here once I have the final list.

All DRM is evil. If I meet any resistance through legitimate routes, I'll turn to piracy in a heartbeat. The digital media industry needs to get their shit together.

I have a Kindle Paperwhite (gen 1) but have been itching to get out from under Amazon's thumb. I hear a lot about the Kobo devices. Are there any alternate e-ink readers that aren't tied to a particular ecosystem? I would love a simple device that's just a reader supporting the common formats without network connectivity, online stores, or any of that other cruft.

You can pull the books off the SD card on an Android phone running the Nook app. That's how I've been doing it since they disabled downloads. Quite annoying though. I used to price shop between them and Amazon, but now I lean towards just buying direct from Amazon unless there's a very large price differential.

Considering I cannot download copies of my iBooks purchases via the web, a more valid complaint (in my opinion) would be that you need a valid form of payment on file with B&N before you can re-download already purchased items.

There's some real nonsense.

B&N is embedded in all the college bookstores and has solid pipelines there. I think right now their ebook focus is on developing their e-textbook rental program.

They've got an edge there that Amazon can't hit too hard.

This whole subject is a source of never ending amusement to me. I am a book lover and still read paper books and each year that goes by I feel increasingly like some kind of rebel.

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