Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
And let's not forget Nook doesn't sell their ebooks outside the US. I've no idea if opening their ebook store to the international customer would help them even a tiny bit, but it would sure be better than continuing like they have.
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They did for a minute. The few customers they had aren’t likely to jump back on the Nook ship should Nook return. They treated those customers fairly poorly. The U.K. support lingered on before they dropped it and sold to a group who eventually sold their ebook clients to Kobo.
I remain of the same general opinion I’ve had on this for some time. Sell the user base to Kobo with some kind of deal that provides benefits to BN. Have Kobos in the BN stores.
It gives Kobo a better foothold than Walmart. Sure BN could go under but even if it does Kobo still reaps the benefit of any device sold at a BN store. BN doesn’t carry the weight of developing or paying for the development of hardware and software but still gets to sell ebooks and get a sliver of the pie. Yes it could be less than they’re getting now but they’d be spending less since R&D would be on Kobo as would support. BN should train store employees on Kobo (better than they did on Nook which wouldn’t be hard) and actually try and leverage the in store support.
I think Nook is too tainted and twisted up with the bad PR from the older tablets specifically the nook color which had shoddy power cables. The experience might be as Zod says it is, but BN needs a better than good product if they expect to get anywhere with Nook. They’re going to need another frontlight level feature and they’re going to need to beat Kindle and Kobo to the punch by a not small amount of time. Or they can leverage their footprint in the US, the fact that their customers are much more likely to be readers than the average Walmart customers, and team up with a company who has the deeper pockets of Rakuten behind them.