Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
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 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.
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Hmm. I wonder what changed, then - perhaps they realized they couldn't compete with Amazon in the US, after all, and so lost their interest in the Nook/ebooks department? Other ereader/ebook businesses seem to focus on markets outside the US, but B&N, being a US company, couldn't do that either. So they just let it go.