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Originally Posted by Sirtel
It seems like they have never known what they want to do. Perhaps they hoped at first that ebooks were a passing fad and soon everyone would return to paper; when that didn't happen, they had no idea what to do. True, most people do prefer paper and ebooks didn't exactly conquer the world (especially outside the US - very few folks read ebooks here, for example), but neither did they vanish. A certain amount of voracious readers prefer ebooks, some casual readers read them while travelling, there are people who can't read paper books due to advanced age or a disability and so on. So B&N can't just abandon their digital business, but clearly their heart is not in it.
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I think at the very beginning they were pretty successful. The Nooks had a reputation of being "hackable." And for several years Barnes & Noble featured them. The first thing you saw when you walked into a Barnes & Noble was the Nook booth — front and center. At one point Barnes & Noble even sued Microsoft because Microsoft tried to enforce a royalty payment for using the FAT system (wasn't just the Nook) — eventually that resulted in a settlement of the suit when Microsoft agreed to invest into Nooks and there was even talk of spinning the Nook division off as its own company. By then I think the market was pretty saturated and it didn't go far. Microsoft sold off their interest and Barnes & Noble continued declining until the English outfit bought them.
Nooks were a pretty big deal for a while in the United States at first. You could buy them in Office Depot, Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Staples, Sears and probably a couple other stores I can't think of now (maybe even Fry's and Circuit City, and probably K-Mart). You could also buy Sonys and Kobos at some of these stores.