nook eReader Owners get More Coal in Their Christmas Stockings 1 comment
Yesterday while Amazon was busy selling more Kindle books than paper books for the first time ever, things were not quite as cozy and copacetic over at the Barnes & Noble campsite.
On the morning of the first day that nook demos became available at B&N stores I went in to my local store and got to take one of the new ereaders for a test drive. One of the sales staff (I think he may have been the store manager) let me actually download a paid book to the demo nook. The download worked as advertised and the new book was available for “formatting” within a few seconds.
As the first wave of nooks to be shipped out began arriving and owners of B&N’s latest and greatest began reporting in to the Barnes & Noble forums it began to appear that my painless experience with the nook’s wireless ebook purchase and delivery system might be more of an exception than the rule. It was becoming apparent from the complaints and reports of ebook purchasing snafus that B&N had probably underestimated the content server capacity needed to support their new ereader.
Buying ebooks on an ereader with a wireless connection is so easy. So easy to click on a few books and add them to your library to be read later. If you are not careful, before you know it you have more to read than you can get to in the next year or so. Once the novelty wears off a bit, ereader owners usually become a bit more judicious with their purchases; realizing the need to pace their buys with their reading speed (and thickness of wallet) and making fewer impulse buys.
It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that when a huge pack of new customers get their eagerly awaited new ereader toy that is already way sold out in pre-order they are going to want to buy a bunch of ebooks to put on it, and so there needs to be an adequate content server system in place to cover that demand.
On Christmas Day Barnes & Noble once again demonstrated their seemingly willful
unpreparedness. Nook owners who tried to purchase and download books to their new ereaders yesterday either received error messages or a “Queued: Will complete shortly” message which didn’t go away until early this morning when downloading started working again. Those who tried to download ebooks from B&N to their PC’s and then sideload to their ereaders had the same problem.
One has to wonder how many sales B&N lost due to this latest failure, not to mention adding to their customer’s frustration and angst. To make matters worse there was zero communication from Barnes & Noble to explain or apologize for the glitches.
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