B&N What Went Wrong & When ?

[Apache]

I also loved dealing with the store's Nook Reps, Even if I had to drive 90 miles to shop at a B&N. When my wife and I had Nook Colors they would replace the charging cord at no charge even when they were out of warranty.
Apache

[WillAdams]

Barnes & Noble went wrong when they decided that they would grow their marketshare at the expense of independent booksellers w/o considering the consequences of that, or the eventual end-game.

[theducks]

Proprietary (AKA A Walled Garden) will always be a No-Sale. Building a higher wall make it a H*ll No-Sale

You come back to a store because of the Service, Staff and Selection not because you shackled me to your store.

[simplyparticular]

B&N bungled things from the very first step in 2009 - buying Fictionwise/eReader, and doing NOTHING except make it more and more difficult to get e-books.

They paid good money for a "social-DRM", but completely ignored the well-developed ebookstore, robust apps and an early-adopter client base, and let it rot on the vine while they built a brand-new store of their own - devices, apps, and selection. None of which ever lived up to the eco-system they let languish.

And they completely supported the BPH agency pricing, which killed off what little use the FW/eReader stores still had.

And then they waited YEARS to integrate those prior customers into their new system, bungled it badly for many, and then broke the one thing keeping some of those customers in their fold - side-loading.

The inconsistent device quality, poor customer service and failure to capitalize on their own walk-in traffic were just more of the same stuff they demonstrated with the Fictionwise debacle.

I haven't bothered to track it, but I suspect B&N was similar to Borders - both had incestuous relationships with the BPH - staff moved back and forth between the corporate office at Borders and BPH for years.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by simplyparticular

B&N bungled things from the very first step in 2009 - buying Fictionwise/eReader, and doing NOTHING except make it more and more difficult to get e-books.

They paid good money for a "social-DRM", but completely ignored the well-developed ebookstore, robust apps and an early-adopter client base, and let it rot on the vine while they built a brand-new store of their own - devices, apps, and selection. None of which ever lived up to the eco-system they let languish.

Ding. Ding. Ding.
I've been waiting to see if anybody remembered.

Fictionwise was the number two bookstore when B&N bought them, sold more and carried more titles than Sony. Biggest indie book catalog at the time. Best customer retention mechanism this side of Whispersync (micropay rebates).

That was half of their launch blunder.
The other half (in hindsight, mortal, but at the time "merely" a headscratcher) was shoehorning in Adobe compatibility.

You had a bookseller selling ebooks that could only be read on Nooks shipping an ereader that didn't need their store. That let people buy *their* hardware and buy books from Sony, Kobo, or any generic store.

That sort-of made sense when they sold the Nooks at market prices (like Sony, Amazon, and everybody else on the hardware side) with 40% markup.

Then, six months later, they completed the bungle by going to near-cost pricing, giving up the 40% markup for the magic beans of 30% Agency margins. Except agency was not universal and people who bought the Nooks could (and did) get their books elsewhere.

Lots of Nooks were sold outside the US, to markets that Nook even refused to sell books to. So, no hardware profits, no ebook profits.

And then, the other shoe; they mismanaged inventory, ordered a zillion STRs and the death spiral began. And that is where getting in bed with Adobe came back to bite them: with the Nook ebookstore fading, readers are perfectly free to get their ebooks elsewhere. Not only is their market share declining in a still growing market, their unit sales are declining. Very fast. Because bad news breeds bad news. And their walled garden has always had open gates so customers are free to go elsewhere. And they have: at their peak circa 2011 they commanded a quarter of ebook sales in the US. Now they are down to maybe 5%, possibly lower.

Most telling: they've never made money off Nook.
Even when they sold almost half as many books as Kindle.
(Yet we know from the DOJ report that Amazon has never lost money selling ebooks.)

My take is that if they had stuck with ereader and fictionwise (and Sony stuck with lrf), we'd be looking at a much more competitive world. Yes, ereaders would probably start at $99-129 instead of $49-79 and they would've taken longer to get there but we'd have three, maybe more, serious players in the ereader business.

Jeff Bezos owes B&N a hearty hug and a big thank you.

[murg]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Jeff Bezos owes B&N a hearty hug and a big thank you.

Maybe it's not that Bezos is a genius, but that all his competition were anti-geniuses....

geniuii?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by murg

Maybe it's not that Bezos is a genius, but that all his competition were anti-geniuses....

geniuii?

Not unlike the rise of Microsoft and Google.
It helps to be good but not as much as being gifted with self-immolating enemies.

[Wearever]

Originally Posted by Apache

I also loved dealing with the store's Nook Reps, Even if I had to drive 90 miles to shop at a B&N. When my wife and I had Nook Colors they would replace the charging cord at no charge even when they were out of warranty.
Apache

I remember when they would help people out like that too, at the B&N I went too. Many appreciated it as well. It was a nice thing to do.

[Wearever]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Not unlike the rise of Microsoft and Google.
It helps to be good but not as much as being gifted with self-immolating enemies.

Lol ! B&N created their own perfect storm, that's for sure.

[Lemurion]

What's sad is that the hardware was generally good, and they pretty much forced Amazon's hand with the Nook Color, which ended up leading to the Kindle Fire.

Unfortunately, they never got the eBook part right.

What really makes that hurt is that it would have been so easy for them to get it right. All they would have had to do was stick with Fictionwise, leave it basically the way it was and keep selling eBooks. Then they could have tied the Nook to Fictionwise and it could have worked.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

What's sad is that the hardware was generally good, and they pretty much forced Amazon's hand with the Nook Color, which ended up leading to the Kindle Fire.

Unfortunately, they never got the eBook part right.

What really makes that hurt is that it would have been so easy for them to get it right. All they would have had to do was stick with Fictionwise, leave it basically the way it was and keep selling eBooks. Then they could have tied the Nook to Fictionwise and it could have worked.

Sony was another player that had everything in place to succeed and threw it all away.

They had a head start, a decent-for-the-times ebookstore, and solid hardware. More, they had a six month window when Kindle sold out that they had the market pretty much all to themselves and they blew it by wasting a year in the transition to epub from lrf. Which they completed just in time for Nook and the conspiracy to wreck their entire business plan by moving the market to walled gardens.

B&N didn't just shoot themselves in the foot; they shot pretty much everybody around them except Apple and Amazon.

[Alohamora]

They lost me when I wasn't able to transfer my fictionwise ebooks to the Nook platform and I didn't get any response from their support people.

I still use a Nook Simple Touch and prefer it over my Kindle, but I won't buy any new device or books from them.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Sony was another player that had everything in place to succeed and threw it all away.

They had a head start, a decent-for-the-times ebookstore, and solid hardware. More, they had a six month window when Kindle sold out that they had the market pretty much all to themselves and they blew it by wasting a year in the transition to epub from lrf. Which they completed just in time for Nook and the conspiracy to wreck their entire business plan by moving the market to walled gardens.

B&N didn't just shoot themselves in the foot; they shot pretty much everybody around them except Apple and Amazon.

Actually, the switch by Sony from LRF/LRX to epub was more of a last gasp effort than a turning point. Amazon already had most of the market by that point. Sony's problem is that while they had a superior reader (I thought the PRS-500 was much better than the kindle-1) and a good selection of books (the equal of Amazon for a while), the only way to purchase and get ebooks on the sony eReader was to use their horrific software program which looked rather like is was written by some summer intern. People sometimes forget that Calibre got it's start in life as a way to get books on to the PRS-500 since Sony's software only worked on Windows. In addition, they basically sat still and did nothing for almost a year when the kindle first hit the market.

The way I normally bought ebooks from Sony (and I bought almost 200) was to use the web site to find the books that I wanted to buy, then buy them via the sony software program. Sony eventually improved their software program and released a version for the Mac, but it was too little too late by that point. Amazon had already had shot past them and had control of the market. Amazon's hardware wasn't as good, but they had a superior selection of ebooks and a much, much easier way to buy and put ebooks on the kindle.

Basic Sony timeline
Sept 2006 - PRS-500
Oct 2007 - PRS-505 (note Amazon introduced the Kindle in Nov. 2007)
July 2008 - Sony adds support for epub.
Aug 2009 - PRS-300,600, added mac software
July 2010 - switch store from LRX to epub.
May 2014 - Sony closes it's store and moves customers to Kobo.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Actually, the switch by Sony from LRF/LRX to epub was more of a last gasp effort than a turning point. Amazon already had most of the market by that point.

No.
Look up the dates.
(I did.)

Sony announced their switch to epub long before Amazon had established itself.
They froze *themselves*.
If they had spent that year-plus improving their ebookstore instead of waiting on ADE they could've survived the switch to near cost pricing. Their plan was to sell (high margin) hardware and let others sell the (lower margin) ebooks. That collapsed when Nook pushed the market to near cost hardware.

After that, they spent years trying to justify higher-priced hardware ina market looking for low-cost readers and later trying to make readers cheap enough to make even a profit from.

Seriously, their pivot to epub in 2008 is what ensured their defeat.
At the point Amazon wasn't even shipping Kindles because they were sold out.
Sonys were in Borders, B&N, online...

They had the market by the throat and blew it because they got standards religion.
For an entire year Sony sold hardware that promoted an ebook format they didn't sell. That was the year Amazon spent growing their ebookstore and establishing themselves as market leaders. Sony spent it rebooting.

[Barcey]

B&N played to not lose rather than playing to win. Instead of doing everything they could to make ebooks successful they did everything they thought was necessary to save themselves. They entered the market to hedge their bet and that only works if nobody else plays to win. Damned competition.