Quote:
Originally Posted by SensualPoet
It's also worth underlining how much the 2011 absence of Amazon in the "touch reader" space allowed other players an opportunity build their businesses (Nook Touch, Kobo Touch and, sadly, missed opportunity for the then over-priced Sony PRS series). At least, until November ...
The moment Amazon rounded out their line-up with a Kindle Touch -- B&N felt the impact directly. The Kindle with Special Offers pricing probably did the most damage. Kindle was relentless with very simple mass advertising: the Kindle is wonderful and its $79. The moment someone wonders into Best Buy looking for a Nook and it's drastically more than $79 -- never mind it is more capable -- the sales conversation gets muddied, diverted or lost altogether.
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I'm late to the conversation, but from the forums I was and am on, it wasn't really the touch aspect (That didn't hurt.) It was access to library downloads. There were threads and threads of people who bought simply for the library access--and some of them already had Kindles. Then, there were threads and threads of people who "Haven't spent one dime on books--getting all freebies and library books." If you visit the B&N nook forum you see a much larger percentage of people looking for lending sites, lending buddies and library info.
B&N has a referral program like Amazon's associate program but when Kindle came out and in the years after, there were many, many sites doing book sorting and referring. With B&N there were a few. There are still a few, but I think the more successful ones are like Books on the Knob who find books in more than one market (B&N, Sony, UK, US, Australia, Kindle) and so on. I followed two B&N only sites and both stopped posting within 6 months. No idea if it was lack of traffic or just too much work to sort.
I do think there is room in the market for both readers (as well as the others) but any time there is shaky financial news, it can impact sales.