Barnes and Noble and Microsoft End Nook Partnership | Hacker News Reader

Barnes and Noble and Microsoft End Nook Partnership

nytimes.com

42 pointsdnetesn26 comments

I never understood and still don't understand this partnership.

So B&N has retail stores and Nook. Nook pre-Microsoft was Android based. They already had a Nook app coming out for Windows 8/RT. So when Microsoft invested a ton of money what was the ROI? Were they hoping to ship Nook devices with Windows RT on it? Or was there some other end-game?

300m is a lot of money and I don't understand what the pay off was even meant to be here.

My rationalization of the investment is that B&N's partnership with publishers is/was tremendously valuable and would be very difficult/time consuming to build. It made more sense to partner with NOOK in order to secure access to that content than to try and build at Microsoft.

Nook was a company built by investments by B&N, Pearson and Microsoft. It was terribly executed but the idea was to help Microsoft complete their digital media catalog that was lacking books and help Pearson and B&N get into digital bookselling.

Unfortunately almost none of those happened!

That's because this was never about Microsoft investing in the Nook.

Microsoft's investment was really just a settlement with Barnes and Noble in everything other than name.

Microsoft sued B&N (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12814018) for infringing on the patents it's been collecting royalties from Android manufacturers for. B&N then counter-sued (http://www.phonearena.com/news/Barnes---Noble-countersues-Mi...).

Once Microsoft invested in the Nook business, the whole thing got dropped. Makes you wonder if Microsoft were concerned that B&N actually putting up a fight might bring the whole of their lucrative Android licensing business in jeopardy.

Also, Microsoft worries about Google, Android, Amazon cutting into their business. Like most large corporations, some investments are defensive. If Nook had gone better, it might have given MS a toehold in that camp.

Yeah, I always saw it as a strategic "me too" product investment in response to Amazon Kindle.

This is my understanding as well. Most of the people Microsoft has sued for android patents have had some other part of the business that would go sideways if Microsoft withheld something (usually Windows) from them. B&N had no such weakness and so could see a patent suit all the way to the supreme court if it wanted, and since the Nook wasn't doing great anyway, the only 'downside' for B&N was that the Nook subbusiness went out of business.

So very uneven on the risk/reward equation for Microsoft. They finesse it by "investing" and getting another "licensee" for their patents.

This never made sense. It may have been interesting if Microsoft had leveraged the B&N physical real estate to let users play with their new hardware, eg Surfaces, but that never happened. Nook continued to be the oft forgotten Android based ecosystem it always was.

So will now MS require B&N to pay for patents again?

Well... The patent list they use to extort Android makers is not a secret anymore, so there is no way B&N could threaten Microsoft with that.

But I guess they now enjoy a perpetual license to those patents anyway.

While it's public, I didn't see any news about anymeone trying to bust those patents so far.

We also don't see many new licensees.

Interesting turn of events. I wonder how this will affect the e-reader industry.

Barnes and Noble should ideally end the entire Nook business as well. Every month I spend around $50 buying books at a physical B&N. I am just happy to buy their books on a standard Android App. Not sure what purpose the e-reader serves.

There's a good amount of people that prefer reading on E Ink screens over normal screens.

I'm not sure why you're writing off e-readers. I love my Nook. It's not as heavy as a book and its battery life is awesome. Also, The E-paper screen really is easier on my eyes and I can get "any" book I want instantly. It's somewhat analogous to the transition from CD player to iPod.

Why not Kindle?

Why Kindle? Competition is good in any industry.

Nook isn't competition for Kindle. It's an also-ran.

At the time Nook had the glow-light and Kindle didn't.

> Not sure what purpose the e-reader serves.

Carrying around hundreds of books is the obvious killer feature.

> Carrying around hundreds of books is the obvious killer feature.

Better indexing and search would be the killer killer feature.

I carry about a hundred books and about that many magazines (in PDF). Being able to search through that stack would increase my perceived IQ by a hundred points.

But an iPad, or Android Phone would do that just easily.

They are in the process of spinning it out, so it will either live or die on its own.

baseless speculation: Yahoo buys Nook division from BN to get into hardware

I too enjoy buying paper books, but I do not enjoy carrying too many of them.

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