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This turns out to be an interesting thread with various views comparing BN Nook vs Amazon Kindle. I think we need to start with basic facts that are very telling what B&N and Amazon are doing right/wrong.
1) B&N spent the last few years building their digital division and tries to re-brand and transform it's core business to digital. Numbers don't lie, while ebooks are gaining in sales year-over-year, but you still can't replace physical book sales yet. They know it and should know they are investing or "throwing" a lot of money away right now.
2) Amazon has a proven web business model that works. They certainly have proven Kindle can be a functional and affordable product [epub or not]. The big difference here [i think] is Amazon isn't trying to reinvent itself. Amazon is actually expanding it's core business with Kindle.
Frankly, from the start, I thought B&N was chasing the wrong stuff. As someone else mentioned before, B&N's business are books but if you walk through any store these days, you find more merchandises that aren't books and in many cases no relations to books. I feel the Nooks are going down the same path. They are following where the money is going but their business model may not evolves fast enough to compete with Amazon and other players knocking on their doors.
I think Apple's iPad [if they continues to innovate] will ultimately divide ereaders and tablets into two camps, a fan-boi must-have gadget vs a poor-man's entertainment, with ereaders being the latter. Either way, B&N will get caught in a race to keep up in hardwares and eventually realized and learned they don't have the technical visions nor the deep pockets to stay in the running.
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