As widely predicted, Barnes and Noble has introduced its Kindle-alike, shooting for the name nook (lower case ‘n’), offered with 3G and Wi-Fi connections and on the market in the US in November for $259 compared to the Amazon Kindle DX at $489.
This entire market appears to be a copy of how Apple has gone about its business model with exclusives and device control. Instead of getting into the consumer electronics business and making such devices, Barnes and Noble (and Amazon) should be partnering with existing experienced CE makers (like Sony and others) and offering a guiding hand on their devices. But in this mad Faultline economy no-one seems to remember who they are any more and book retailers sudden think they are device designers and service operators.
Is it because no-one will produce what Barnes and Noble wanted? Unlikely. It’s the feeling that everyone now needs to operate a hardware tie in so they make more money and establish control over devices.
Anyway the main feature and business model change over Amazon is that the big US book shop wanted to allow what public libraries have allowed since time immemorial, and that’s the lending of books, not just buying.
Barnes & Noble continues to bill itself as the world’s largest bookseller, though we suspect it isn’t any more, because it is roughly a $5 billion enterprise, about what Amazon does in a single quarter.
The nook is Google Android based, just as a number of recent announcements in this market have already shown will be an increasingly important direction. This device may end up as the first Android ebook reader to be delivered but it’s not the first announced. It offers an electronic Ink display and offers both 3G wireless access in the US provided by AT&T’s network, as well as Wi-Fi access.
Barnes & Noble sees the Wi-Fi being used for in-store browsing of books, and it’s a way to get people to go to one of their thousands of a book stores and read big samples of a book online, but that book will disappear from their nook when they leave the store, unless they rent or buy it.
‘We asked our customers what they wanted in an eBook reader, and specifically designed nook to be the most full-featured, fun, stylish and easy-to-use eBook reader on the market,’ said William J. Lynch, President of Barnes & Noble.com. ‘With our nationwide footprint, Barnes & Noble customers can see, touch and hold nook. Our 40,000 booksellers are ready to help customers discover how easy it is to download and read eBooks on nook, and what a pleasure it is to have access to their favorite eBooks, magazines and newspapers any time and anywhere.’
The nook uses the Vizplex e-ink display with no glare or backlight and adjustable text size. The screen is split into two, the book at the top, in paperback page size, and color artwork underneath, in what is effectively a second screen for browsing cover art, or it can convert into a virtual keyboard or show photos.
The 3G works in the same way as Amazon’s Kindle allowing users to browse and buy ebooks over AT&T’s 3G wireless network, with no set-up required or additional wireless costs. Amazon has just agreed its own deal with AT&T to drop the Sprint network, known to have patchy coverage in some parts of the US, and us AT&T’s network instead.
It just so happens that AT&T also provides the Wi-Fi at Barnes and Noble book stores, so it was easy to cut a Wi-Fi deal as well. For those of you who have never been to the US and gone into a Barnes and Noble store, you can sit and read all day, buy coffee, meet your friends and use Wi-Fi there, a bit like StarBucks but quieter.
It calls its book lending deal LendMe and it’s not about lending form the store, but to each other, and allows book purchasers to lend books to friends for up to 14 days at a time on their iPhone, iPod touch and on some BlackBerry and Motorola smartphones, and PCs or Macs where they have a copy of the Barnes & Noble eReader software. This is a DRM lock-in if we’ve ever seen one, so the files will be encrypted and the software will run a timer to self destruct the eBook.
The nook has a ‘Reading Now,’ set of bookmarks with means that it will open the device at the last book you’ve read, even if it’s on another device such as your smartphone or laptop, and lets you pick up where you left off, including annotations. They seem to auto-sync in the background whether that’s over the cellular network, broadband or through Wi-Fi.
The nook can hold 1,500 eBooks and it comes with an expandable memory slot for a 16GB MicroSD card which holds up to 17,500 eBooks. The device will also read PDFs, while the lower screen, as we mentioned can be used to view photos or even run a mobile montage of pictures.
There are one million books in the Barnes and Noble online store and bestsellers and new releases cost around $9.99. It also has deals with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to deliver issues every day, as well as Forbes, Newsweek and The Nation magazines.
Around 1,300 of its 40,000 stores will support a campaign with in-house e-book kiosks, while many others will support a storefront display of the new device and handle sales.
The nook eBook reader will begin shipping at the end of November and Barnes & Noble is already taking pre-orders now at www.nook.com and in stores, and is giving away books to the first 10,000 customers.
Like The Amazon Kindle, it won’t arrive in Europe any day soon, because it needs that cellular connection for seamlessly buying books, but at some stage one of the local operators will do a deal we’re sure.