Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
They could come out with awesome hardware. They could come out with awesome software. They could massively cut the prices of their books. But I still wouldn't buy from them. B&N corporate policy had them throwing their customers under the bus. Once you've been run over by a bus, you have a long memory of that, and a healthy suspicion of all buses well into the future. IMHO, B&N cannot recover, period. You reap what you sow.
|
I can't agree with this enough. I don't actually want B&N to fail or the Nook to be discontinued, but I've had some terrible times with them. I took a Nook ST w/GL in to address an issue, but to fix it, they just reset it without warning me. I lost my library books and any other sideloaded content I had along with my reading places in them. Another time I brought in my Nook GL+ that wasn't downloading a recently purchased Nook e-book. I was told I'd have to wait for someone on another shift to help me with my "outdated device" or upgrade to a tablet that "wouldn't have such issues".
I purchased my Nooks because they were first with a frontlight that I could demo myself in a store before purchasing (the customer service desk seemed just as excited to demo it with my at the time since it was brand new). Then, they added waterproofing to the Nook GL+ along with the 300ppi E-Ink Carta display at a decently affordable price and it seemed like the obvious choice for an upgrade. Kindle and others arguably had better implementations of these features later on, but the Nook was also touted as being more "open" (HAHA, saw how that has turned out) in comparison to Amazon's offerings and I can't stress enough the ability to demo one in person at my local store.
Last month I got my wife a Kobo Forma, somewhat skeptically though since I had no way to demo the device myself here in the US (Kobo's deal with Walmart has yet to make an appearance at my local stores and Walmart employees seemed clueless about it altogether). After a lot of online research, especially here, Kobo seemed to tick all of the boxes for me. So, I took a chance on it and I'm very glad I made the purchase! I only spent about a half hour with it, setting it up with my wife (like two children with a new toy at Christmas) and I'm ready to ditch my perfectly functional Nook GL+ for a Kobo Clara HD, or possibly another Forma since hers never leaves her side anymore. I'm not sure if the Nook GL3 fixes any of these issues, but the Overdrive integration with Kobo for checking out e-books from my library, the Pocket integration, the ease of managing collections via Calibre, sorting books by series order, the font and layout rendering, and the overall hackability of Kobo (even to the point of possibly replacing Pocket with Wallabag) is an overall win for me in every category. Nook would need a lot more than just new management "righting the ship" to win me back at this point.