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Nook Color won’t save Barnes & Noble says Forbes’ Marc Gerstein
November 4, 2010 | 9:52 am
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By Paul Biba
In a very sympathetic article, Marc Gerstein says that the Nook Color won’t do much to improve B&N’s stance against arch-rival Amazon.
Here’s the crux of the problem. Barnes & Noble has great stores. They’re well located. They look good and, with the armchairs and coffee shops, feature great ambiance. The product offerings (books, magazines, music CDs, videos) are often on target and typically varied based on the stores’ locations. The prices tend to be reasonable. There’s a nice loyalty program. Promotions tend to be appealing. Many stores host interesting events. But despite all this, it’s a lot harder than it used to be to persuade those who visit the stores to spend money before leaving, and the challenge is likely to worsen going forward.
To some, this may call to mind the Blockbuster (BLOAQ) experience, where the once king of video succumbed to a rival with a different business model, Netflix (NFLX), and technological change (electronic delivery) that seems more compatible with the way its rival does business. I think, though, that such a comparison unfairly denigrates the B&N operating philosophy. The latter never dug into the old ways but has long been willing to evolve when it comes to delivery (call and pick up later in store, mail order whether in a store or via web, and, of course, its having jumped into e-reading).
One problem seems, at least in my opinion, to involve execution. While B&N is a world-class bricks-and-mortar bookseller, it doesn’t seem to have brought all that skill to other ventures to the extent one might have hoped. Does anybody believe barensandnoble.com is as good as amazon.com? Some believe Nook is as good as Kindle (or even better if one values an open e-book format), but not enough if one goes by market share.
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Gerstein seems to be having trouble separating brick’n'mortar from digital. I don’t think that B&N expects NOOKcolor to be the “savior” of B&N, much less to be the savior of the brick’n'mortar stores. NOOKcolor is just an additional entry in the NOOK lineup, targeted toward the more casual reader who is more likely to read magazines and newspapers for a few minutes at a time rather than to immerse themselves in a novel for hours at a time, and toward graphical books like cookbooks, children’s books, graphic novels, photo books, etc.
Despite some attempts by B&N, the NOOK devices aren’t as strong at getting NOOK owners into the stores as they could be. The More In Store feature is pretty lame, consisting primarily of author interviews, recipes, and the occasional short-short story. The Read In Store feature is of value in some stores, but many B&N stores have removed or dramatically reduced their reading areas, leaving no place for the NOOK owner to actually sit down and read an e-book for free for an hour. Occasional NOOK specials at the B&N Cafes aren’t advertised, and are only good at those stores with a B&N Cafe anyway. In addition, certain stores have perennial problems keeping their Wi-Fi operating, and NOOK owners have given up going to those stores.
B&N’s refusal to allow their membership program to be used on anything NOOK is (surprise) driving NOOK owners to quit paying for the membership program.
The bn.com web site is definitely weak when compared with Amazon, and B&N’s recent revamp seems to have made it worse instead of better. In my opinion, this is where B&N really needs to get its act together if it wants to thrive in the digital marketplace.
I go to B&N to physically view the look and feel of books before ordering them on Amazon!
This is not 100% true. But it shows what kind of obstacles are faced by physical book stores. There HAVE been numerous occasions when I’ve found a book I liked at B&N, realized I could get it for 30% to 40% cheaper on Amazon and then just gone home and ordered it.
Since I read cheap fiction on my Kindle I don’t buy throwaway paperbacks any longer. The only paper books I buy are things like cookbooks and art books that don’t do well on current ereaders. These are the kind of books where I don’t mind waiting a couple of days for delivery.
There is probably no way forward for B&N. The only solution would be to drop their prices considerably. But they probably can’t do that while maintaining a chain of brick and mortar stores.
B&N’s best way forward would be to woo other hardware manufactuers (namely Sony) and get everyone on the same page with DRM. The magic promise of ePub interoperability has been poisoned with all the competing DRM. You can bet that Amazon and Apple won’t be changing their “ecosystems”, which gives B&N an opportunity to be “the store that supports everyone else”.
Except… they’re not. I can’t buy books from B&N and read them on my Sony.
Kobobooks is already “the store that supports everyone else” and it is getting stronger every day. Plus, it has a credible and active business outside of the US. If partnering is the next step, Sony + Kobo makes more sense than Sony + B&N. On the plus side, B&N has some time and some cash flow from the bricks and mortar business to figure a way through (or out). But it doesn’t have *much* time.
I guess I can’t speak for anyone else. But I actually passed on smartphones, Kindle, all the tablets, and the first generation nook (I do use the Barnes and Noble PC readers- that’s why I read and comment here). Nook Color just went to number 1 on my Christmas list.
So there’s an audience. Maybe it’s just me.
The Nook Color will not run apps straight out of the Android Market, but that does not mean it cannot run them. In fact, they have done a lot of tests on apps from standard Android smartphones and they pretty much run on Nook Color, which has Android 2.1 under the hood. (The Nook native interface and apps are just standard Android application layers.) Barnes & Noble special Nook SDK runs on top of the standard Android one and gives developers access to exclusive extensions and APIs for the Nook and its interface. So porting Android apps is not difficult. B&N says it is more like optimising them for Nook than porting them. Nook Color screen is supposed to be better (less reflective) for reading than iPad thanks to new LG screen with anti-reflection coating. It allows to watch videos, listen to the music, view Office documents and PDF’s. If you prefer e-Ink screen, the original Nook is still available from BN.
When the Kindle batteries begin to need replacing, I read that it is eighty dollars, a huge advantage for the Nook will become clear.