Aug 16 2012
Thursday News: Tos;DR, Fair Use rulings, and poor B&N nook sales
B&N’s Nook Tablet Sales This Year Ranged Between Diddly to Squat – Barnes & Noble is betting on the Nook to save its bacon and with the declining number of eink purchases, the Nook tablets are being pushed hard. The problem with the Nook tablets is that they are overpriced (as compared to other comparable Android tablets) and worse, they lack content. Tablets are for watching video, playing games, and browsing the web. It’s about robust apps and music and multimedia. B&N’s tablets are capable of doing all those things but they lack the actual content. In order to watch a movie, for example, you have to stream it live or actually learn how to rip your own digital movies (which some studios argue is a violation of copyright). If you want to listen to music, you buy it from Amazon or Apple and then figure out how to sideload it onto a device. Most people either don’t want to do this or don’t know how. B&N’s lack of ability to offer content that matches its device is killing itself as evidenced by the abysmal numbers this year. In quarter 1, B&N accounted for 3% of the tablet market and in quarter two, it fell to 1.9%.
“According to iSuppli’s analysts, B&N sold only 459 thousand Enhanced ereaders last quarter, and they sold around 614 thousand in Q1 2012. In contrast, Amazon is estimated to have sold over a million Kindle Fires each quarter.”The Digital Reader
The New Tablet Reality for E-Books: Will Readers Read Less? – Forbes suggests that the slow down in growth of ebook adoption may be attributable to tablet growth. If you have a tablet, ebooks are competing for the owners attention with other things like facebook, games, and social interaction with others. I wrote an article a few weeks ago about why publishers needed to invest in greater digital lending because library access can foster readers. The last thing that publishers can afford is to lose readers to other forms of entertainment. Forbes
Terms of Service; Didn’t Read – This is a stupendous service. A group of individuals are reviewing and then rating the Terms of Service for many of the popular internet services around the web, trying to distill each lengthy document into consumable and understandable points. If I had more time, I would totally join. Maybe I can twist Robin’s arm into joining.
“Making the fine print easy to understand…Each data point will be assigned a weight in the rating of the website in question as soon as there is a rough consensus in the mailing list thread. So the classification of each website simply depends on how many positive and negative data points we have posted about it on the mailing list.”Terms of Service; Didn’t Read
How Paperbacks Transformed the Way Americans Read – This is a very fun and interesting read on how the mass market paperback transformed publishing. The move toward mass market paper books was transformative not just for the production side of books but for the consuming public. It’s a transformative change akin to what is taking place now as we move away from mass market paper books to digital books. Astonishingly, trade paperbacks were introduced as early as 1953 and in response to the academics, literary elite, and others who disdained the mass market format.
“Quantity was key. De Graff knew that if he could print 100,000 paperbound books, production costs would plummet to 10 cents per copy. But it would be impossible for Pocket Books to turn a profit if it couldn’t reach hundreds of thousands of readers. And that would never happen as long as de Graff relied solely on bookstores for distribution. So de Graff devised a plan to get his books into places where books weren’t traditionally sold. His twist? Using magazine distributors to place Pocket Books in newsstands, subway stations, drugstores, and other outlets to reach the underserved suburban and rural populace. But if Pocket Books were going to sell, they couldn’t just stick to the highbrow. De Graff avoided the stately, color-coded covers of European paperbacks, which lacked graphics other than the publishers’ logos, and splashed colorful, eye-catching drawings on his books.”Mental Floss
Amazon’s Next Kindle Fire Android Tablet Clears the FCC – Nate points out a new filing by “Harpers LLC” has cleared the FCC. According to Nate, Harpers LLC is a front for Amazon and has been used by Amazon in the past to try to sneak through FCC documents without revealing their launch plans to the world. The specs for the device in the FCC papers hint at a 10″ tablet. The Digital Reader
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Aug 16, 2012 @ 06:54:28
Is the Kindle Fire really better than the Nook tablet? I have a Nook tablet and love it as an ereader, but have been frustrated with it as a tablet. I’ve seriously considered switching to the iPad, but will probably wait to see if and when they develop a newer tablet with Microsoft.
Aug 16, 2012 @ 07:43:52
@sandy l: Hardware wise the Fire and Nook Tab are comparable, it’s content where Amazon is much better. Amazon’s Kindle store has more books and more deals, Amazon sells MP3, has Audible and has a large and growing video service (Nook relies on Netflix & Hulu+ among others which the Fire also has access to). Amazon’s appstore, which works on pretty much any Android device and has tons of apps vs. B&N’s which works on only the two Nook’s (Color & Tab) has very few apps and generally higher prices (or did last I checked). The Fire is less ‘locked’ and allows you to sideload apps from other sources, the Nook Tab did this initially and B&N took the ability away in an “update” (I’m still a bit sore about that). A 7″ tablet works best IMO as a consumption device and the Fire is far superior to the Nook due to the volume of what can be consumed. The Nook isn’t BAD, at least not as a reader, you just can’t do anywhere near as much as with a Fire or a regular Android Tab like the Nexus 7 or Galaxy Tab 2.
Aug 16, 2012 @ 10:01:19
“Diddly to Squat” oh that made me laugh.
When Flynn kids No. 1 and No. 2 were combining their life savings to buy a tablet this summer they were looking at the Nook and the Kindle Fire. They came down on the side of the Fire because of the apps. When a 9 and 6 years old are looking at things that way, you have to figure the grown up population is doing so even more.