Barnes & Noble said Monday that its popular nook e-book reader is back in stock online and will be rolling out in the majority of the bookseller's U.S. stores this week. Customers also will be able to enjoy exclusive Valentine's Day-themed online content  this month, the company said.
The nook differs in several ways from many of the e-readers announced at the Consumer Electronics Show, which suffer from either high prices or little access to consumer channels, said Forrester Research Vice President James McQuivey.
"The nook, despite its slow start, is priced right, targeted to book readers rather than skipping off to focus on magazine or newspaper readers, and, most importantly, the nook will be featured in front of millions of book buyers every month as they walk through the store," McQuivey said. "You can't underestimate the power of that."
A Real Shot at No. 3
The nook is the first e-reader to offer digital lending for a wide selection of e-books, and the company's latest software update now places a LendMe flag next to the eligible e-books in the user's My Library folder. Though the machine's LendMe technology only applies to select books and only lasts 14 days, McQuivey considers this to be a huge step forward, given that people often share books and then spend a considerable amount of time talking about them with friends and family members.
"This fact is so critical to the way people read books that it is amazing that none of the e-readers yet offered to the market have any meaningful book sharing built into them," McQuivey wrote in a blog.
Among all the e-reader launches beyond Sony and Amazon, McQuivey thinks the nook has a real shot at becoming the third key player -- but not because of its social features.
"The social features are too few, too hampered by publishers who don't want to participate, and too hard for people to grasp for now," McQuivey explained. "So in many ways, the really impressive aspects of the nook -- its social features -- are likely to stay under the radar until somebody else figures out how to promote social in a more meaningful way."
So far, there's no evidence that any vendor is planning to emphasize the social aspects of e-book reading. "Especially lacking in this area is the iPad, a device that could have been built on social experiences but wasn't," McQuivey said Monday. (continued...)
Anonymous:
Posted: 2010-02-12 @ 1:17am PT
I really wonder why Amazon has not gotten into a Partnership with a brick and mortar shop yet to sell the Kindle. As with every electronic device it is very important to experience the design and feel of ther device, just to see if it fits your hand is in my opinion a MUST for something that costs so much money. nobody would buy a TV online if you haven’t had a look at it somewhere else in a store, why does Amazon think that poeple are willing to do so with an E-Reader.
B&N will have a huge advantage from this, just the possibilities in terms of promotion and consumer shows are much better now that you have the thing in stores. It makes the whole E-Reader sector much more tangablie for people.
Now they just have to finetune the device itself (see http://www.e-reader-reviews.com/barnes-noble-nook-reader-review/ -- the last user review at the bottom) and the success can get started!:-)
Cheers from Switzerland,
Daniel
Anonymous:
Posted: 2010-02-08 @ 5:35pm PT
Do "next" pages appear as quickly as "next" pages on the Kindle (i.e. do Nook's pages refresh as quickly as Kindle's)?
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