The B&N Nook is on its deathbed

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From Good Ereader:

Barnes and Noble has no plans to release a new e-reader this year and the bookseller has moved the entire Nook section to the back of the store in almost 600 locations in the United States. The display areas have been torn down and thrown in the garbage.  The Nook e-reading app for Android and iOS has not been updated since April and I have been told by the engineers that there will likely be no further updates until least 2019.  The Nook Audiobooks app, which is not even promoted last saw an update in February 2018. I suppose it is now safe to say that Barnes and Noble no longer cares about the Nook unit.

Over the course of the past three years B&N has been slashing costs in the Nook division, hoping to make it profitable. The company fired most of their staff and outsourced all firmware and software development to an Indian firm, but they are doing a terrible job. Last year B&N also proclaimed that they are no longer in the technology business and will focus on selling books online and in their retail stores.

A few months ago Barnes and Noble fired Chief of Digital Fred Argir. The bookseller did not publish a press release or mention it during their latest quarterly financial report. He was initially hired by former CEO Ron Boire to gut the Nook division. Under his watch the Nook App Store and Nook Videos was shuttered. The Silicon Valley R&D office for Nook was also closed down and B&N ceased to design their own hardware and just outsourced it to Netronix.

Link to the rest at Good Ereader

23 thoughts on “The B&N Nook is on its deathbed”

  1. So glad I got away from the Nook now. So glad I sold my Nooks before this happened. I don’t see it surviving much longer at this rate – it’s already a zombie.

  2. It’s too bad the Barnes and Noble execs didn’t simply have the businessman’s acumen to have sold Nook to Kobo.

    At the very list the merger would’ve allowed Nook to survive as a subset of Kobo and given some passive income to Barnes and Nobel.

    Barnes and Noble will be a case study for decades at the business schools of how to run any company to the ground

    xavier

    • I think they did have the acumen. It was just easier in their minds to scrap the entire thing. They don’t seem to care much about making money in the long-term, and merging Nook with Kobo in any way would have been a step in that direction. I agree with comments made on other posts about B&N’s top people squeezing everything they can out of B&N before shuttering it. They aren’t planning for the long term. They’re planning for leeching from the corpse.

      • “Après moi, le déluge.”
        Some corporate leaders are interested in building something that can live and prosper on its own without them.
        Others…not so much.

        • Some corporate leaders might. But the owners are in charge here. It’s their company, and they have decided to convert the company to cash. Authors might not like what other people do with their own stuff. OK.

          • Actually it isn’t (indie) authors mourning.
            Those gave up on them years ago.
            Its traditional publishers and (some) readers.

            B&N was never a friend to authors so their survival means wouldn’t mean anything.

            • These pages are full of independent authors telling us how B&N and publishers can and should save themselves. Looks like survival of those folks means a great deal to lots of independent authors.

            • If we all took a drink every time some independent here provided criticism, advice, or recommendations to B&N and publishers, our livers would fall out.

              I agree B&N hasn’t had much effect on independents. In fact, their demise would probably help independents. But observation shows independents are very concerned with the fate of B&N and publishers.

              I’m not sure why this is the case, but my speculation is that for anyone over age 30, traditional publishing and physical bookstores were the world they grew up in, and the world they dreamed of joining. Now it’s on the way out.

            • The concern is because of “competition” for the most part.
              A lot of people believe in competition for competition’s sake rather than any actual vested interest.

              Purely theoretical concerns.

              You see it a lot in reader forums where people proclaim their hopes for Nook, Kobo, and any generic epub reader…
              …while they keep on buying their ebooks from Kindle.

    • It was a reasonable decision given their primary objective of selling the whole company. They had been trying to do that for years. The Nook would have made it more attractive.

  3. I’m wondering how different their world would have been if they had only done e-ink readers and apps that use the Nook format. I think a lot of the money they blew was on the Android tablets, which was and is a brutal moving target.

    That, and a little more money spent on their internet experiences might have made some difference. There’s nothing *intrinsically* wrong with the Nook, at least that couldn’t be fixed by some software engineering talent. They’re just getting clobbered by Amazon is all.

    • Two other big failings:

      1- Using Android at all. It got them a messy patents lawsuit, a freeway for hackers to install Kindle for Android, and an ongoing guerilla war with the hackers. Time and money that should’ve been spent improving the system went to making sure enthusiasts couldn’t use the hardware all the ways Android enabled. If they wanted a lockeddown platform they should’ve gone with a stripped down LINUX like most other ereader vendors of the day.

      2- The half-hearted embrace of ADOBE epub. They wanted it both ways, to be open and proprietary at the same time. Very schizoid how the hardware was open to other ebook stores while the ebookstore was closed to anybody but Nook hardware owners. They even deprecated PCs and Macs along with all the generic ereader vendors. It got them the worst of both worlds, especially after they chose to move the hardware market to near-cost pricing. It meant a lot of people buying their profitless hardware that bought few if any offsetting ebooks.

      They just didn’t seem to think things through.
      Still don’t.

  4. Very happy with my Nook, but I stopped buying ebooks from them a few years back. I’ve side-loaded ebooks onto my device since the beginning, so shuttering the Nook apps/online store/etc. don’t really have an impact. Hardware-wise, it suits me fine; Calibre is all I need to convert any Kindle purchases.

      • No; everything lives on my 32gb memory card. The two reasons I opted for Nook over Kindle are memory card slot and variety of file types.

    • My story is similar. I like my Nook e-ink just fine, but I haven’t bought books from Barnes and Noble in ages. I’ve been using Calibre for years. I put all my Amazon books on my Nook once I convert them and use an SD card for book storage. Of course, I have no idea how much longer the device will last, and I’ve been looking around at the newer Kobo devices, but I’m not in a hurry, because my Nook hasn’t been giving me any trouble.

      I do have some Kindle/Fire tablets, but I’m done with them. Just not interested in another.

  5. I think B&N’s problem with Nook has always been that there’s no compelling reason to buy Nook ebooks rather than Kindle ebooks, other than a desire to spite Amazon. You just don’t want to buy from the biggest kid on the block. You want to support the underdog. And there’s just not enough people with that attitude to sustain Nook. The hardware doesn’t really matter, since one e-reader is as good as another. And the ebooks themselves have the same content whether you buy from Amazon or Nook. The only difference I can see to influence the decision of where to buy an ebook is in Amazon’s favor: Amazon has the most likelihood of still being around in 10 years, so my ebook purchases are safer on Amazon.

    Nook is doomed.

    • Also, Amazon has almost a million titles that are exclusive to the Kindle platform. Nook has no exclusives as far as I know.

      • The had exclusive PEANUTS contents on the NookCo!or.
        And went ballistic when Amazon got a few DC timed exclusive graphic novels for the launch of the FIRE tablets.
        Because that’s how they roll.

        Also, don’t forget why so many Indies went KDP Select to start with.

        (A “minor” scandal about Nook downlisting Indie romances.)

    • They were doomed from the start.
      Mind you, they did all the right ereader things…
      …in the absolutely positively worst way possible.

  6. That they seem to be giving up entirely on ebook delivery makes me wonder how much they’re going to devote to ebooks. I mean, pushing a good reader is a great way to get someone into your ecosystem.

    • They aren’t going to devote anything to eBooks. Look at their actual behavior, not what we might want them to do. They are taking as much money as they can for as long as they can make it last. That means money will not go to eBooks. It’s their company.

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