Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
While I agree that B&N has been running their Nook business badly for years and to the detriment of e-book readership in general (yeah, still bitter about Fictionwise), I will point out that for years, they have hosted their official Free Fridays weekly blog feature, which continues to offer at least one decent-quality spotlighted free book, usually from a traditionally-established publisher, often with a comment and favourite reading recommendation by the featured author, and has now expanded to offering a weekly free app and TV episode.
This actually puts them above most of the other retailers*, who usually don't bother to spotlight any freebies at all beyond occasionally lumping them in to one giant megacategory if they even bother with a dedicated Free Books listing/filter at all instead of making you hunt through the slushpile or figure out the arcane advanced search terminology.
Aside from that, IMHO their implosion is pretty much a result of everything else they've been doing wrong, which outweighs this one thing they've been doing right.
* I'd say they're about par with iTunes, who in several countries do a Free Book/Music/App/TV show of the Week feature, minus the sporadic author commentary, and have also removed the easy ability to download DRM-free ePubs in a usable format for anyone who's ever opened the iBooks application on their Mac. |
I did not know about the Free Fridays and going through the past posts explains the random NOOK books that I have gotten when making other purchases at B&N. There never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to the books that were getting added to my account when I was making a purchase! (I assume that I can get them even without purchase; I just didn't know to ask.)
I thought I was signed up for all of their emails, but I don't get anything about the in-store NOOK promotions. (Like this and the 2 for 1 weekend NOOK deals.) I only find out about them from reading the deals forum here.
I always come to the MobileRead Patricia Clark Library first when I'm looking for a particular PD book to read. Most of the time, I have been able to find the book I want here, as well as other books by the same author, if I decide I want to read more. I find that the book being in the library here -- with comments by the person that posted it and others who post to those threads -- are a better recommendation that 500 random Goodreads reviews.
(I'm currently reading The Black Tulip by Alexander Dumas, which is not in the epub library. However, it is in all of the other formats, uploaded by Patricia. I wish I'd thought about Feedbooks; I would have downloaded a copy from there, but now that I am halfway through, I think I'll just keep going with the version I have from the Sony store. I will keep them in mind for the future though.)