Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
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.  |
I think Amazon has been the one leading the race to the bottom in hardware sales: remember , the $79 kindle 4 and the $199 kindle fire? They can do that because they make their money on sales of other stuff, I guess.
BN is trying hard to be competitive but its stuck in the same vise as the rest of the brick and mortar book sellers- the vise that squeezed the brick and mortar record stores into oblivion: it's just cheaper and more convenient to buy digital reproductions of content online.