The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg prefers to do his e-reading on an iPad. (So do I, most of the time.) And he’s reviewed iPad e-readers: Apples iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.
Tag Archives | Barnes & Noble
E-Readers are Dead. Long Love E-Reading!
Over at Ars Technica, Jon Stokes is noting that the explosion of new e-readers that seemed to be coming this year has turned out to be more of a whimper than a bang. Plastic Logic’s Que ProReader is dead, Hearst’s Skiff reader shows no signs of life, Samsung’s E-Ink reader is apparently skipping the US market, and none of the umpteen readers from lesser-known companies has become a breakout hit.
Still in the game: Amazon’s Kindle (the e-reader that’s synonymous with e-readers), Barnes & Noble’s Nook (which B&N is about to double down on), and Sony’s Reader (the first modern e-reader). Oh, and there’s Kobo, the Canadian e-reader backed by Borders. I don’t see any of these going away anytime soon–actually, as Slate’s Farhad Manjoo points out, the likely scenario is that they’ll get even cheaper and sell even better.
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Barnes & Noble Doubles Down on the Nook
Amazon.com’s Kindle may have the highest profile of any e-reader, but Barnes & Noble seems to be pretty darn serious about its Nook. The New York Times reports that the company is planning to make space for Nook boutiques in its superstores, dedicating a thousand feet of floor space near their cafés to Nooks, Nook accessories, and in-person and video demonstrations.
B&N plans to free up room for Nooks in part by shrinking space devoted to CDs; in this era, you gotta think that it probably would be deemphasizing sales of music on shiny discs no matter what. It says it’s not going to carry fewer dead-tree books.
The move presumably means that B&N is in the hardware business for the long haul and already has future generations of Nooks in the works. The first-generation Nook got off to a somewhat bumpy start–its software was slow and buggy, and some promised features weren’t immediately available–but the company has improved it through multiple software updates. It’s also knocked the price down to $199 and introduced a $149 model with Wi-Fi but no 3G connection.
Barnes & Noble also offers e-reader software for the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, PC, and Mac, and it powers the e-book stores for devices from Nook competitors such as Pandigital. The Times doesn’t say whether the new boutiques will spotlight any of these other ways to read digital books.
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Good (But Confusing) News for New York Times Fans Who Own iPads
Barnes & Noble has released a Nook application for Android and is (logically) rebranding all its other e-reader apps with the Nook name. But it has another piece of news today that’s more intriguing: iPad owners can now use Barnes & Noble’s app to subscribe to a full-blown digital edition of the New York Times. Cool–but I’m more confused than ever by the Times’s own iPad app, which is beautifully and intelligently designed but which offers only a smattering of content.
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More E-Reader Price Cuts
Sony finally responds to the price chops by Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com with new, lower pricetags for its trio of Reader e-readers.
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Borders Sort of Responds to the E-Reader Price Wars. You Out There, Sony?
As of Sunday night, the Kobo e-reader sold by Borders was a $150 gadget that dramatically undercut the $259 pricetag on Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Then B&N cut the Nook’s price to $199 and introduced a $149 model, and Amazon responded by knocking the Kindle down to $189. The Kobo is still a cheap e-reader, but not strikingly so–especially considering that it has neither a 3G connection nor Wi-Fi.
So Borders has taken action, but not in the form of a straight price reduction: It’s including a $20 gift card with purchase of the Kobo, reducing the effective cost of the e-reader to $129. I don’t think Kobo matters enough (at least not yet) for Amazon or B&N to feel forced to react to this price cut. But I suspect that before all the product introductions and price reductions are done with, we’ll see three standard price points for e-readers: $200 or thereabouts for 3G models, $150 or thereabouts for slightly less fancy ones, and $99 or thereabouts for basic models that you might still plausibly want to own.
Still to be heard from: Sony, whose $169.99 Reader Pocket Edition and $199.99 Reader Touch Edition are now a tad pricey–and whose already-big-ticket $349.99 Daily Edition is totally out of whack with the e-reader economics that Barnes & Noble and Borders established yesterday,
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Nook Pricing Conundrum
As of today, Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader costs $199. Yesterday, on Father’s Day, it was still $259, but with a special offer. My old pal Brad Grimes continues, in a comment from our post today on Amazon’s Kindle price cut:
I bought a $259 Nook yesterday (Sunday) as a gift for my father, enticed by an offer for a “free” $50 gift card. When I saw the price today, I called to see if I could get the difference back. I was told I could get only $10 back. It turns out, after looking at my receipt, they didn’t charge me for a $259 Nook and then give me a “free” $50 gift card, as advertised. They gave me a $209 Nook and charged me $50 for the gift card. Was I just shafted by Barnes & Noble? Harry, help an old friend!!!
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Amazon Responds
Well that was quick! For a few hours this morning, Barnes & Noble’s 3G Nook cost $70 less than a Kindle. Now the Kindle is ten bucks less than the Nook. Wonder what the chances are that B&N will match or undercut the Kindle’s new $189 pricetag? (It may not need to, given that it’s also announced a $149 version of the Nook.)
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Nook Gets Cheaper…and Even Cheaper
Barnes & Noble has knocked the price of its Nook e-reader down from $259 to $199–and announced a Nook with Wi-Fi but no 3G connection for $149. The $199 model is the lowest-cost e-reader with 3G; the $149 one matches the price of the Kobo from B&N retail archrival Borders. (The Kobo doesn’t even have Wi-Fi–you download books to a computer, then sync them over via USB cable.)
Amazon.com’s Kindle is still $259 as I write, but Amazon has had plenty of time to decide how to respond to a B&N-initiated price war, and presumably has a strategy in place already. Seems like the general post-iPad trend is for E-Ink e-readers to get dive down below $200 in price; it’ll be surprising if the Kindle–the current model, anyhow–is an exception.
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Barnes & Noble's eReader Arrives on the iPad
Unlike Apple and Amazon, bookselling behemoth Barnes & Noble didn’t have an e-reading app available for the iPad on day one. But it’s just released an iPad version of its eReader–please don’t call it Nook–thereby bringing all the e-books B&N sells to the iPad, including any you’ve already bought on a Nook or in other versions of eReader. And it’s good enough that it feels like the iPad e-reader race is currently a three-way tie.