Would you believe, the word “nook” isn’t just associated with small spaces, anatomy, children’s literature, a land measure, or the Nook e-reader from Barnes & Noble. The Donna Nook, a UK fishing trawler, served during World War II as a mine sweeper.
But could the oh-so-forthcoming e-reader be itself a mine of sorts, blowing up B&N’s corporate rep in e-bookdom? Amazon is shipping out zillions of Kindles, and preordered wireless Sony Readers are supposed to ship out December 18-January 8. By contrast, as noted by TeleRead’s Chris Meadows, Nook demo units aren’t even making it to stores until at least December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Wasn’t the big idea to attack Amazon where it was most vulnerable, in that customers can’t go to brick-and-mortar stores and try out the Kindle in person?
Nook fans are furious since B&N promised to start shipping by the end of November, and $10 gift certificates will hardly placate them.
“They have changed the ship dates and don’t want to admit it,” complains Don Smith, a TeleRead community member and Apple Distinguished Educator with a B&N reader on order. “The only videos I’ve seen with someone operating the device other than the advertisements have the individual really closely guarding the device, holding it close and letting no one touch it. This was also true at the New York press conference.” I’ll e-mail B&N for its side, directly.
Meanwhile, referring to a squabble with another company that claims B&N stole the Nook design, Don doubts the legal dispute could be a reason since “I know computer companies just go ahead and ship and solve court cases later.”
He adds: “I won’t be too surprised to see another delay because all this reeks of manufacturing problems. B&N is going to lose a bundle on this one since Amazon is going to collect a good percentage of the pent-up fervor for e-books. I guess I’ll just keep chugging along with my TX and my iPod Touch. The best thing about the whole bit is the e-book store that makes it so easy to download Google books in eReader format. And maybe by the time mine arrives with its detour to Florida [where he vacations] there will be an improvement in the operating system that supports folders.
“I’ll check my American Express card every so often; that’s where the real truth will be told about the nook. When they charge me I’ll know it’s been shipped. After the customer service problems I’ve had with B&N the last few days, I’m really not interested in purchasing anything more than the ‘gift’ card they sent me tonight.
“Hello, Books on Board and Better World Books.com. At least I can acquire the items I purchase from them.”
By the way, back-ordered Nooks now are even supposed to be shipping until January 11.
Related: Earlier TeleRead items on the Nook.
Remember how much trouble Amazon had keeping up with initial Kindle orders? And they never put demo units in stores.
B&N in this case is doing no worse than Amazon in its opening salvo with a reading device… but at least you can buy and read B&N books, right now, without having their device. For that, I’d cut ’em some slack.
B&N faces another hurdle; staff training.
One big issue in B&M gadget retailing is that buyers expect the sales personnel to know at least as much as they do about the product. (Yeah, riiight!)
This can explode in one of two ways; lost sales as the prospective buyer catches the misinformation and walks away in disgust or, worse, they make a sale and get a quick return once the misinformation comes to light with aggravation to all concerned.
(Given the comments here, I expect the have some work ahead of them:
http://newteleread.com/wordpress/2009/11/30/barnes-noble-delays-nook-shipment-to-stores/#comment-1150046
Expect some embarrassment early on. And they’d better keep a tight lock on their return rate data.)
One big *advantage* of online product sales is that the retailer speaks with one voice; whether accurate or not, the sales pitch is consistent to all comers. Not true with B&M retailers and this can be a boon with well-trained personnel but a disaster without them. And, complicating matters for B&N, is the question of how many of their staff are by nature book people or gadget people. (I expect way more of the former and few of the latter.) The buyer’s experience is going to depend a *lot* on the staffer they meet.
This will be an interesting test of how important hands-on pre-purchase access is. And if Amazon gets ahold of nook return rate data…
I won’t cut B&N any slack for several reasons, which have been hashed out in public before.
1. B&N ignored its loyal customer base (it’s members) by refusing to give a discount on the nook and on ebooks.
2. B&N ignored its loyal customer base (it’s members) by refusing to accept B&N gift cards in payment for either the nook or ebooks (the latter now having changed but beginning sometime down the road).
3. B&N ignored its loyal customer base (it’s members) by originally offering free expedited shipping on the nook only to B&N members and now offering it to everyone who has ordered a nook. Of course, this wasn’t much of a big deal in any event as B&N offered everyone free expedited shipping (delivery in less than 3 days) on all orders over $25 as a standard part of business.
4. B&N ignored its loyal customer base (it’s members) by suddenly making everyone eligible for the member price regardless of whether they are a member. So loyal B&N members paid an extra $25 to become a member for what purpose?
5. B&N ignored its loyal customer base (it’s members) by using only canned e-mail responses to any query sent to customer service rather than reading the e-mail and tailoring a reply to the questions asked.
6. B&N ignored its loyal customer base (it’s members) by giving a $10 gift card to those who preordered the nook whether they were B&N members or not, but simply ignored B&N members who suddenly find their membership worthless because everyone is treated as if they had paid the membership fee.
Bottom line: B&N deserves no slack for any reason.
It’s a rollout of a new product and a new e-book store. What, you thought B&N would know everything about what it was doing and have it all set up perfectly from the get-go? Amazon didn’t manage that, either.
Okay, so your $25 isn’t getting you anything extra from the brand-new e-book store or Nook. That can still change, as B&N gets its act together. No need to condemn them because they stumbled their entrance.
For my money, B&N made a prime mistake in the eink-ebook device field: they announced the thing before they had shipping containers full of them sitting outside their fulfillment centers waiting to be shipped, and stacks of them in the back rooms of all the major stores waiting to be trotted out and placed on glowing, shining display.
But we also make a similar mistake when we grumble with posts like this one. Producing those eink screens has been troublesome from the very beginning, in the long vaporware years before they could even ship any. As Steve Jordan notes, Amazon ran into this same problem with the Kindle. Those eink screens, for whatever reason, are hard to produce in any significant quantity or yield. It’s starting to mature now, happily, but with new eink devices announced every month, it’s no wonder that the supply chain is constrained.
Add to that, the fact that the Nook also incorporates the LCD touchscreen, and the OS has to deal with both screens, and we should all exercise patience…a lot of it.
There was zero chance that B&N was going to hurt Amazon’s well-established Kindleverse this year anyway. 2010 is the year when we will find out if the Nook can give the Kindles any serious competition.
I’m looking forward to playing with a Nook at my local B&N…sometime next summer, maybe. Until it shows up, I’ll bide my time. There are going to be a lot of interesting devices with ebook reading potential as those ARM-powered sub-netbooks and slates come out, and I expect CES in January will have many goodies for us ebook fans to lust after.
Steve, that’s like saying it’s OK that the surgeon cut off the wrong leg — after all, it was the surgeon’s first try. B&N has been a bookseller for a long time and knows its chief competition is Amazon. It doesn’t take a genius to know that when you are not the first in the field you plan carefully and learn from those who went before you. B&N has failed on all counts.
Yes, it can change but will it?
Does anybody have information about this company? They claim to have the Nook in stock for $295. They are also are offering the Kindle 2 for $230 and the Kindle DX for $399.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/11/prweb3272404.htm
Desktop reading applications are rather blasé. I could do that years before the Kindle with Microsoft reader or Mobipocket, but it just isn’t a practical way to actually read whole books. Likewise, I could read the same ebooks on my Axim PDA since, at least, 2002, but the screen is so my eyes hurt and the battery gave out after a few hours.
B&N is behind the lines and dropping the ball. So far, there is not a hint of anything special about what B&N is doing or will offer or anything in the tech specs of the Nook that has impressed me.
“Amazon good (except when I’m whining about search for my own book).
Everyone else (B&N, Google, Sony, etc. ad infinitum) bad.”
That’s about all I’ve ever learned from Teleread.
Sigh. There are little driblets of actual news that make it worthwhile coming here, but you guys are getting really annoying. (Except for ficbot. She rules!)
Steve,
Amazon started selling Kindles the very day it was announced — I had one in my hands a few days after the announcement and wrote a review on my blog (http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/?p=215). In fact, many professional reviewers, like David Pogue and Walt Mossberg, had units ahead of time and wrote immediate reviews.
After a deluge of orders, Amazon ran out during both of the past 2 holiday periods. As far as I know, they gave accurate information at the time of purchase about when orders would be delivered.
B&N, as far as I can tell, hasn’t put a real Nook in almost anyone’s hands yet so you really have to buy on faith. I saw Pogue say on twitter he doesn’t have one yet.
I was surprised that a clerk showing off the non-working model at a Boston B&N was touting that it was “just like” a real Nook even though it didn’t have a battery inside and was thus much lighter than the real deal.
And they appear to have over-promised on delivery dates. Not off to a very good start.
@Rich, that analogy is stretching things just a tad.
@Greg, I use a PDA for all of my reading, and have never had issues with eye fatigue… nor have I had issues with too-short battery life; I’ve never been reading in a stretch for so long that I used up the power on my PDA. It’s a very practical way to read e-books, for a lot of people… don’t assume all people hate smaller or LCD screens.
@Aaron: Yes, reviewers got Kindles right away… that much B&N should have done better, as well as getting demo units into stores. But as you pointed out, Amazon had supply problems during the holiday periods, too. And I’ve heard different stories regarding Amazon’s order timeliness and delivery estimates… some people waited months to get a device after ordering.
You can’t just call your factory and say “Deliver me 10,000 devices next week”… it takes months of advance planning for a production run, and if they underestimate demand, there’s little they can do about it in the short-term.
I suspect B&N has fallen into that same hole Amazon previously occupied, because after all, there was little indication of the holiday popularity of readers before a few weeks ago, and I’m sure they were planning conservatively.
I also suspect B&N had some issues with production that pushed back their holiday rollout plans (just an impression). I really don’t think they would have rolled out their store and product just after the holidays, if they’d had a choice, do you? Their problems in this regard may have been out of their hands. On the other hand, a store wouldn’t usually go through all of this, miss the holidays by that much, and say, “Oh, well… let’s just put it all on hold until next year, shall we?”
I realize B&N isn’t exactly making an auspicious debut into e-book-dom here, but at least they’re making a legitimate attempt to get into the market, which is more than I can say about quite a few bookstores and publishers…
Listen to me, all of a sudden I sound like a B&N cheerleader…
@Steve Jordan: I’ll go one further and declare myself on the fence ’til I get my hands on the Sony Daily Edition, and be a Sony cheerleader (which, I guess I already am, owning both a 700 and a 300).
@Generally speaking:
My argument for not buying a Kindle was that I had never seen one in the wild. That was last year. I travel up to 80-90% of the time for work, so I can honestly say that I’m surprised to have only seen one Kindle in the wild since my original decision to not buy what I could not touch. I know people who own Kindles, but no one close enough where I wouldn’t have to travel 3+ hours to see the unit up close and personal.
I actually held out on buying the Sony 700 because the kids at Borders could not physically show me the backlight in action (due to the switch being locked underneath the store security leash). The manager promised me personally that I could return the unit if I was not satisfied with the backlight functionality. The backlight works, (in fact, the backlight makes the unit much more usable when turned on) so I kept the unit.
So… Sony’s success at getting unit in my hands + ePub = continuing customer.
Amazon gets enough of my money for paper technology books.
B&N gets my local business because of the sad state of Borders stock (or lack thereof) at my local store.
Guess I’ll continue to spread the ebook $ evenly across the vendors who can satisfy my demand at the prices I want to pay.
It’s now time for Barnes and Noble to display on the Nook splash page what product is available and the exact date of shipment. No more speculation, no more hiding behind $10 “gifts”. It’s simple – there’s just so much available, it’s working at the level advertised and if you ordered on this date, then you’ll get product at a certain date. The more they hide, the more they’ll be cornered.
Business is business and if you don’t have it right your whole company suffers. Admit it – you blew it. Tell us now what you plan to do to make it right for your loyal customers.
I totally agree with Felix concerning staff training. I’ve gone to a number of Barnes and Noble stores in Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey and in every store I was able to obtain opposite information concerning several features of the Nook. Many of the salespeople at B&N are part time and have been working the paper trade for years. One of the ground rules in public education where I spent thirty seven years was that if teachers weren’t fully trained to implement new programs or a new curriculum, they were bound to fail.
In this case you have many individuals who are very resistant at all levels of the sales force to the intrusion of technology into their marketplace. I bought a Rocket eBook from Barnes and Noble ten years ago. I still own it, but never really used it. The rate of return for that device was very high because it didn’t work. I used it to demonstrate electronic technology. I also spoke about e-ink and it’s very first implementations at those conferences in 2000.
As noted above, I’m an Apple Distinguished Educator selected in 1995. I’ve watched Apple literally climb back from the depths of products that wouldn’t work and couldn’t sell. And now thanks to Steve Jobs and a number of other geeks with a mission, they “own” several key markets. The e-book market is begging for a “Jobsian” guru to come along and usurp that market by controlling all levels and providing a self evident solution for it.
Aside from the fact that Steve and many other “West Coast” types state that “nobody” reads anymore, I think they are wrong. Maryanne Wolf in “Proust and the Squid” provides some interesting answers on how we are making transitions in our reading development and that the secret to reading is that it frees the brain for “time to think beyond”.
It’s important for the Nook to succeed for now in the same way that other steps in the history of reading provided us with ways to learn anew. I’m really not upset about not getting my nook yesterday. I’m upset that those who make promises need to be sure they can keep them before they decide to make them.