Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
To the OP:
As you can see , most folks here buy mostly free or discount material and rarely pay over $10 for an ebook. You are atypical only because you buy a greater percentage of books at $10 or more than the average poster on this thread.
Dunno if it proves that most Nook owners usually buy only free or discount material, though. If true, then maybe BN investors are right to be freaking out, since they make their money mostly on book sales.  . |
Grain of salt time: folks like us are hardly representative of the mainstream ebook reader customers, much less the subset that are drawn-in by the B&N brand and the ties to their stores. Most people buy ebook readers, especially the walled-garden Kindles and Nooks, to get access to their ebookstores. And they do use them to buy. Cheap or expensive, they buy. And Amazon, at least, makes *some* money on even the $0.99 cheapies.
That said, B&N has been way more aggressive in their "race-to-the-bottom" hardware pricing than Amazon. So if their ebook attach rate is lower than expected, or if they have been drawing a large fraction of their sales based on library support they could be in deeper trouble than "just" an excess of STRs clogging the system. (Bad in itself: 1 million extra STRs could eat their cashflow for a year.) It's too early to tell, though. And their problems aren't limited to Nook, anyway. Their store financials are a way bigger problem.
Anyway, there *are* price-insensitive ebook buyers out there; you just won't find many here.
