Archive for the ‘Barnes and Noble’ Category
Samsung eReader to Connect with Barnes & Noble eBookstore no comments
In a press release today Samsung announced the “ imminent availability” of its first ereader for the US market. Samsung has partnered with Barnes & Noble which will provide the ebook storefront.
This would be Samsung’s E6 ereader. Some of the features include a 6-inch 
e-ink screen with a Wacom digitizer with note taking and annotating abilities. Productivity tools include a voice recorder as well as a journal and a calendar that can sync with Outlook.
Connectivity includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. EmoLink technology allows users of Samsung ereaders to share content. The E6 is also compatible with B&N’s LendMe feature, so sharing should work between this ereader and devices using B&N’s eReader software as well as the nook ereader.
The E6 ereader comes with 2GB of internal memory and has a Micro SD card slot.
One feature that will not be much of a crowd pleaser is the previously announced price tag of $399, although it is always possible that the price will be lower once the E6 hits the streets. I saw Samsung’s ereaders at CES and there was not much that would make me want to jump up and run out to buy one at $399. Update: The price on the E6 has reportedly dropped to $299.
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New York Times to Offer Stand-Alone Book Review Section for eReaders no comments
The New York Times currently will cost you $13.99 per month to subscribe on your Kindle, Sony or Barnes & Noble compatible ereader. The NYT apparently plans to break out its Book Review section and make it available as a separate product at an undisclosed price.
PoynterOnline reports that Times director of marketing James Dunn referred to the plan during an interview at the Digital Publishing Alliance. The Sony Reader Store will get the Book Section first in a few weeks, followed by the Kindle store and Barnes & Noble.
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LG to Introduce eReader; nook In Stock at Barnes & Noble Stores 1 comment
The Emirates Business 24/7 (via E-Reader-info) quotes LG’s CEO of the Middle Eastern and African region, KW Kim as saying that LG plans to “launch a new product, maybe by April. It will compete with Apple and Amazon."
No additional details were given, except that the new ereader will be released in the Middle East and Africa. LG Display is making the metal-based flexible displays for the Skiff ereader and has also demonstrated a large format flexible screen prototype meant for reading periodicals and tabloids.
nook eReaders In Stock
Barnes & Noble has caught up with the backorders and should have the nook available in most stores from the middle of this week. You can also order a nook online now without getting on a waiting list.
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Nook Gets Update V 1.2 no comments
Yesterday Barnes & Noble started sending out firmware update V 1.2 OTA. Some of the issues that the update addresses:
- Enhanced in-store seamless connectivity to enjoy free Wi-Fi, with our More In Store content and promotions exclusively for nook owners.
- Improved opening of eBooks and periodicals
- Improved response to Reading Now & Settings buttons
- Current reading page and bookmarks on all eBooks is properly saved when your nook is powered off
- Bookmarks display page number
- Eligible LendMe(TM) eBooks in My Library include a LendMe(TM) flag
- Easier navigation of daily subscription with issues rolled into one folder
- Improved “back” button functionality for navigating eBooks and periodicals
- Personal files downloaded onto nook and displayed in My Documents can be sorted by author & title
- Overall system improvements and battery optimization
There are reports that in some cases the update has corrupted contents of the My Documents folder. This glitch seems in particular to be affecting PDF files. It would probably be a good idea to back this folder up onto your computer if you have not received the update already – just in case.
B & N says that it will take around a week for the update to reach all nook ereaders, but you can also do a manual download if you can’t wait.
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Disturbing Cracks Starting to Appear in the nook’s Facade no comments
There are a few disturbing reports on the Barnes & Noble nook related forums of nook ereaders which are already developing stress related cracks on the page turning buttons. There are also reported sightings of cracked nook demos in B&N stores.
Unlike most other ereaders which have a page turning button presented through a cutout in the bezel, the nook uses a flexible plastic bezel that when depressed activates the page turning mechanism. This repeated flexing is apparently causing fatigue in the plastic which is then cracking.
The picture above shows the page turning buttons on the Kindle and the nook, and a close-up shot of a cracked nook bezel submitted to the B&N forum by icebike.
This is a worrisome development as the nook ereader has only been on the street for less than two months. Hopefully this will prove to be a production problem that only affects a certain percentage of nooks, though I really doubt it. B & N should have known better than to expect a strip of plastic like this to withstand thousands and thousands of flexes as users advance pages. As the nook ages this could blow up into a major headache for both owners of the nook ereader and Barnes & Noble.
Barnes & Noble appears to be replacing nooks with cracks; but from what I have read I would advise that when you call their customer service you stress that the crack is interfering with your use of the ereader rather than just being a cosmetic problem. Even if it seems to you to be only a cosmetic problem at first, it will interfere with your ereader’s operation as the crack gets worse.
It might also be a good idea to use the LCD touchscreen for page turns as much as possible.
Update: It seems a reasonable assumption that this problem is exacerbated by cold. If you are out and about in the winter wonderland with your nook, you might want to let it warm up a bit before using the page turning buttons.
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DecalGirl Skins now Available for nook eReader no comments
DecalGirl now has almost a hundred nook skins available. Besides Kindle and
nook skins, DecalGirl also has skins for the Bookeen Cybook Gen 3 and over one hundred skins for the Sony PRS-600 Touch edition. Skins are also still available for the older PRS-505 and PRS-700 ereaders.
Nook skins also come with a downloadable wallpaper that continues the skin picture across the screen. A matte/satin finish option is also available for nook skins.
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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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Nook Update no comments
Nook ereaders began receiving the first of Barnes & Noble’s promised firmware updates on Sunday.
So far users report experiencing faster page turns and less time spent with the infamous “formatting” screen. Some comments on the B&N forum also claim improved responsiveness from the touch screen as well as a few other small improvements. The in-store WiFi connection has been enabled and nook owners who bring their ereaders to a B&N store should find a coupon for a free cookie.
The update (v1.1.0) does seem to have caused a new problem with Adobe Digital Editions however. The ADE software which you need to load ebooks in this format onto the nook places your books in the Adobe folder. To read them you need to move the books to the My Documents folder so that the nook can recognize them.
Some nook pre-orders that were originally supposed to ship by Dec. 18 may not make it for Christmas (big surprise). B&N is offering a $100 gift certificate to some of these customers:
All customers in the original Dec. 18 group will receive an email tonight (12/18) with information about their orders.
Most of these customers will be told that their nook will arrive by Dec. 24, as originally promised.
Some customers will receive an email indicating that we are aiming to deliver your nook by Dec. 24. Because we know that some of these orders are gifts, we are sending all of these customers a nook Holiday Certificate that they can use if they need to.The Holiday Certificate will be delivered by Dec. 24. If we cannot get these nooks to you by Dec. 24, we will ship them for overnight delivery by Dec. 29. If this happens, we will email you on Dec. 23 with updated information, and a bn.com online gift certificate.
We apologize for the delays, and thank you for your patience and understanding. Please check your email for full details. And, as always, check with customer service at 1-800-THE-BOOK if you have further questions about your specific order.
I wanted to get a nook ereader myself, but I procrastinated and didn’t place my order when the nook was first announced. I did place an order on November 8, with an expected shipping date of Dec. 11. After reading all of the negative reviews, playing with a nook demo myself, seeing the shipping date slip several times and finally reading about all of the problems people were having when they did receive their nooks I cancelled my order. So far I have to say that I have not seen much to make me regret jumping ship. Well, on the other hand, there are those free cookies.
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A Few More Things Considered no comments
A roundup of several ereader related news stories from the last few days.
Borders Not Making Their Own eReader
Reuters reports that Borders Group, Inc. CEO Ron Marshall denies that Borders will make its own ereader. He cites reasons such as the expense and time required. Marshall also makes the point that while it may still be possible to launch a successful ereader product, the window of opportunity is closing fast, with the field due to become even more crowded in the near future.
Borders announced a partnership a few days ago with Kobo to sell ebooks on the Borders website. Marshall says that Border’s ebook strategy will be “device agnostic.”
Sounds like a good idea – we really don’t need any more me-too ereader clones.
Sony Gets Exclusive Content from WSJ and MarketWatch
A few days ago Sony announced a new relationship with Dow Jones & Co. for exclusive content from the Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch to be delivered wirelessly to the Sony Reader Daily Edition. Sony will also be offering the only version of the New York Post available on ereaders.
The monthly subscription for the WSJ will run $14.99 or $19.99 for WSJ Plus. The New York Post will be $9.99 per month, and Marketwatch Today will be $10.99 per month.
Sony’s Reader Store only seems to have three other newspapers at the moment besides the Wall Street Journal, though other newspapers should be available soon.
nook gets Rooted & Hacked
Last weekend nookDevs reported that they had successfully rooted the nook ereader, and in the last couple of days they have been apparently getting apps such as a browser to work on hacked nooks.
Rooting an Android-based device gives you administrative rights and the ability to alter system files, and therefore the ability to totally control the device.
This is nothing that the average nook ereader owner will want to do; rooting a nook involves invasive surgery that voids the warranty and could very well brick your ereader. However, in very short order we should begin to see some software hacks for the nook that will be more accessible.
Third party apps for the nook’s Android operating system have been something that some fans of the nook ereader have been hoping and waiting for. Barnes & Noble has so far not commented about nookDevs’ activities. When the nook was officially announced B&N kind of sort of left the door ajar to apps, but I doubt that they would be happy with a browser that would eat up bandwidth that B&N would be paying for. But wait, the nook has WiFi as well as an AT&T connection. Perhaps a browser that would work when the nook has a WiFi connection could fly.
The latest Kindle Chronicles podcast has an interview with the 18 year old high school student behind the nookDevs website.
Kindle DX Sold Out
Estimated shipping time on the Kindle DX is now four to six weeks.
Notion Ink Pixel Qi Tablet
Slashgear has a report about the first confirmed device to use the Pixel Qi display. The tablet should be unveiled at CES in January.
The device will reportedly be based on the Nvidia Tegra T20 chipset which supports 1080p HD video. There are lots of additional bells and whistles including WiFi and Bluetooth, GPS, digital compass and camera.
Pixel Qi could well prove to be the dark horse of 2010’s several new display technologies. With the ability to switch between a transmissive display mode like a regular LCD and a reflective epaper-like mode, Pixel Qi could be used to make multifunction devices and notebooks/netbooks into very viable reading platforms.
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eBook Store Comparisons – The Second Edition no comments
One of the biggest gripes about Barnes & Noble’s ebook store is their prices; which are higher than the competition, right? Well, hold on a minute there. Barnes & Noble has said that they are working on bringing down prices, and indeed there have been comments affirming this on their forums of late. Time to take a closer look.
Almost two months ago I made an ebook store price and availability comparison between Sony, Amazon’s Kindle Store and Barnes & Noble. In my comparison using just over a hundred books the Kindle Store came out ahead, both in terms of prices and in the number of books available as ebooks. Sony’s ebook store came in second and B&N came in third.
More recently Inkmesh made a much, much larger price survey using 11,604 ebooks. In their case they found that Amazon had the lowest price on 74% of titles. Barnes & Noble came in second and Sony had the highest prices of the three in Inkmesh’s test.
I just ran my test again, using the same books as before and came up with some surprising results.
First of all, what is Sony’s story? Mostly their ebook prices were unchanged from my last test: I found four books on my list with lower prices, but 5 went up in price. None of the paper books previously unavailable as ebooks from Sony have been made available as of yet. What was really strange though, was that I found nine ebook titles that were available before but are no longer showing up in Sony’s ebook store!
Sony just threw out their old proprietary BBeB ebook format and moved to EPUB, and it is possible that their are some search related glitches on their site. I did notice some strange behavior when I searched for ebooks by titles rather than author. So maybe the missing titles are still there, but I just couldn’t find them. At any rate Sony came in at a distant third place in my test. They are not only out of the race based on prices; they apparently also have an incredibly shrinking catalogue.
So how did Barnes Noble fare when compared with Amazon this time? Well, first of all, in terms of availability 80 of the paper books on my list were available as ebooks at the Kindle Store. This seems to actually be down by 1 title from the last time I ran my comparison. B&N had 71 of my titles available as ebooks, which is an increase of 6 titles. Furthermore, if you bought all of the ebooks on my list you would have saved only a little less than a dollar by purchasing them at Amazon. As reader Aoverstreet has pointed out, you would also pay sales tax at B&N but probably not at Amazon (not yet anyway), depending on where you live. It appears to be true that Barnes & Noble is aggressively lowering their ebook prices to match Amazon’s.
Based on the ebooks on my list it appears that the nook vs Kindle ereader competition has turned into a tighter race. This will be even more the case if Barnes and Noble can get the nook’s software issues fixed before Amazon releases Kindle 3. It is a virtual tie now when it comes to prices (again, based on my list of only 110 books). B&N still trails the Kindle Store in terms of content, but it appears that they are working on that as well. Definitely Barnes & Nobles deserves kudos for listening to the complaints of their customers and working to improve on weaknesses.
Matching Amazon’s ebook prices means B&N’s bottom line is going to take a big hit though, especially if ebook sales come to comprise 48% of all book sales as Jeff Bezos says they do at Amazon in cases where a Kindle version is available. On November 24 when B&N reported their financial results for the most recent quarter, they cut their earnings guidance for next year by a lot – almost by half if it comes in at the bottom of the range. This was blamed in part on increased production costs for the nook as the company ramped up its production schedule to meet the higher than expected demand, and “increasing future investments related to its (Barnes & Noble’s) digital strategy, including additional people, technology and in-store marketing support”.
I’m wondering if this “digital strategy” at the time also included planning for much lower prices from its ebooks? Of course, it may be possible for B&N to make up the revenue difference through sales volume, especially if the nook ereader brings in a lot of new customers rather than just converting the store’s present pbook customers to ebook buyers. My point is that I imagine it will be harder for Barnes & Noble to fight a sustained ebook price war than Amazon, which after all has many other streams of income than just book sales.
