Quote:
Originally Posted by taosaur
The developer community gave B&N months of buzz in the tech sphere that brought credibility and brand recognition for the Nook line to a critical mass that brought in a dozen non-hackers for every rooted, re-flashed or alt-booted device: enough to actually lend value to the social features tying the N2E, at its launch, to the NCs already in circulation. "The hackers who bought the NCs" are a slim minority of B&N's e-reader sales, who can take substantial credit for the remainder. And contrary to frequent speculation that the devices themselves are a loss leader, B&N had a slim margin of profit on the NC when it released, which has only grown as component costs have fallen in inverse relation to strengthening sales.
Again, if B&N in any way orchestrated those events (I give them credit at least for striking while the iron was hot with the timing of the N2E release), they are to be congratulated.
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Did buzz in the Dev community really result in increased sales of NCs among average users and sales of B&N content ? So far as I can tell, most hackers did not say, " Buy the NC so that you could get a better experience buying and using B&N content." Rather, the hackers said, " buy the NC because it's easy to hack it so that you can buy content on the Google market." Virtually every person who has rooted the NC on this forum seems to be doing just that. Hard to see how B&N benefits from that. I also didn't see the devs rally to create better games and apps for B&N , either. As I said, maybe building good will in the hacker community may result in some kind of gain for B&N long term. But so far, I don't think " open ness" has paid off for B&N .
Frankly, it seems that B&N has not benefited from their "open " approach. Maybe Amazon will do better with its approach.