B&N What Went Wrong & When ?

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

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.

I included all the dates in my post. 2008 was when they added support of epub to their devices, not when they actually switched the format of what they sold. They announced that they were going to be switching in August 2009. We even had a long thread discussing it on Mobileread.

[chaley]

FWIW: around 2 years ago we contacted B&N to ask them if they would allow calibre companion in their app store. They said no with no explanation. We interpreted the response as "we don't want any holes in our garden wall," but we cannot prove that. The problem sent away when they capitulated and allowed purchasing apps from Google play.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

I included all the dates in my post. 2008 was when they added support of epub to their devices, not when they actually switched the format of what they sold. They announced that they were going to be switching in August 2009. We even had a long thread discussing it on Mobileread.

Spring 2008 to August 2009 was a whole year and more that Amazon was promoting a unified ecosystem. Hardware. Ebooks apps.

SONY?

They were talking up epub on the hardware while still trying to sell lrf in the bookstore.
They never said what they would do for customers of lrf books until after the switch. Who'd buy a format even Sony said had no future? And with DRM nobody had cracked? Not many, turned out. The finally got their store running in time for the conspiracy and the 4 hour price war.

The froze the store. For over a year.
And they froze their own market.

They osbourned their store at the worst possible time.

Now, it wasn't their fault that B&N stupidly destroyed the market for hardware-only vendors but if they hadn't killed their walled garden they would've had a chance once the rules changed. One of the advantages of proprietary formats is you control your own fate.

And Sony knew that!
Playstation is built on it.
They had the means to compete and threw it away.

[Wearever]

Originally Posted by 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.

I agree, they over did the self preservation to the degree that it seemed like they were paranoid. Not just a walled garden but a fortress with a moat around it. Lol. They kept adding things to keep the enemy out. However they also treated their customers the same way.

It was like a constant reminder that it's our stuff and not yours. Enter if you dare ! I don't think many people liked it in the end. Sales dropped with each new condition placed on customers.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Spring 2008 to August 2009 was a whole year and more that Amazon was promoting a unified ecosystem. Hardware. Ebooks apps.

SONY?

They were talking up epub on the hardware while still trying to sell lrf in the bookstore.
They never said what they would do for customers of lrf books until after the switch. Who'd buy a format even Sony said had no future? And with DRM nobody had cracked? Not many, turned out. The finally got their store running in time for the conspiracy and the 4 hour price war.

The froze the store. For over a year.
And they froze their own market.

They osbourned their store at the worst possible time.

Now, it wasn't their fault that B&N stupidly destroyed the market for hardware-only vendors but if they hadn't killed their walled garden they would've had a chance once the rules changed. One of the advantages of proprietary formats is you control your own fate.

And Sony knew that!
Playstation is built on it.
They had the means to compete and threw it away.

You do know that the original nook was released in Nov. 2009? Kind of hard for it to seriously effect events that occurred before then.

Yes, as I said in my earlier post, Sony made some bad decisions and pretty much fell by the wayside because of those bad decisions, but all that happened before the Nook. By the time the Nook came out, Amazon already had something like 90% of the market. Sony had a year's lead time on Amazon, yet lost the market to Amazon within a short time. That takes some really bad decisions.

I can't blame Sony for their proprietary standard. After all, everyone had a proprietary standard at the start, including Sony and Amazon. Sony also supported the epub standard (without switching their bookstore to it) as soon as it came out (2009). Amazon still only supports their own format. Sony's problem was more that they made it difficult to buy books from them. That's what Amazon got and why Amazon won the battle. They made it easy to buy books, easy to get those books on the kindle and possible to buy books on a whim. They also understood that content was king and worked hard to make as many books as possible available, something Sony never got either.

[Alpha o]

I bought the Nook Wifi. Still have it and it still works.

I read the TOS and didn't like the agreement, and somehow managed to bugger the registration so bad that even B&N experts couldn't fix.

I never bought an e-book from B&N. Most of the books I had were DRM free from places like Gutenberg, Creative Commons or stores that sold DRM free. Everything went on the SD card. Wifi is never on.

I like the form factor with the buttons to turn pages and the keyboard and index down below. I like to read while I'm eating, and this keeps hot wing sauce off the display. It didn't like a certain memory card, so now it's in the kitchen for downloaded recipes. Doing quite well. I far prefer this to the junk on Kobo's home page.

I think I'm not the only one who did this. Some of us were turned off by B&N pushing junk in B&M stores. Got to the point where it was easier to get a book from Amazon. I know the clerks have to push it, but I got tired of the selling of the discount card. For one or two books a year or magazines, it wasn't worth it.

I won't buy a reader unless it does use an SD card. I have an Android tablet, but I don't care for the battery usage or the screen glare. I do have books on it. It uses an external card but it's a 10.5 inch and gets heavy after a while.

Daughter wanted a Nook - took her to the local B&N. She lives in the UK, but does have an American credit card so she can order books. It took us over an hour and a half for the service rep to set the Nook up for her. I bought it and sent her to the service desk.

[Froide]

I agree with much that's already been posted above. What I haven't seen mentioned, though, is BN's squandering of its competitive advantage as one of the largest textbook providers in the USA by (IMO) mismanaging its e-textbook platforms, NOOKStudy (introduced in August 2010) and Yuzu (introduced in April 2014):

• NOOKStudy and Yuzu are not usable on NOOK or other e-reader devices (they were designed for use only on PCs, Macs, and iPads) - which lets Amazon.com and other sellers/renters of digital textbooks eat B&N's breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
• Yuzu not only does not share the same accounts as the NOOK Store or NOOKStudy, it is also incompatible with NookStudy textbooks. Therefore, as Emily Price at Engadget observed: "With Yuzu, [NOOKStudy]'s being phased out, and sadly any pricey books you've already bought through that service are incompatible with the new app."

This song's title expresses my reaction to many of the NOOK Division's missteps, most especially those since 2011:

[Wearever]

I agree with you Froide, it's the same time period that I think things started to go wrong. 2011-2012. There was a noticeable shift before 2011 and after.

[7hir7een]

I've had a few Nook readers myself. I feel like the decline was continual from the time I got into the ecosystem (about January 2011).

My first e-reader of any sort was the original Nook Color tablet, which I enjoyed at the time. Primarily because I was able to root it and access either the B&N part, or an Android tablet part. This allowed me to expand the usability of the tablet to a great extent. What stopped me from upgrading? Well, the inability to sideload apps and (easily) root the upgraded tablets was a deathblow as far as I was concerned. B&N just didn't offer many apps, and that was a lot to pay for such a limited device. By the time they partnered with Samsung, I'd decided I wanted a iPad instead, and was pretty much done with B&N anyway (more on that below).

My next device was the Nook Simple Touch Reader. The 240MB memory/split partition nonsense upset me, but thankfully there was still an sd card slot to allow me to get my content on there. I encouraged my whole family to get them -- it was my first e-ink reader and I was incredibly excited about it. While I never had any major problems with my device (mainly just some qualms related to sideloading and ease of use), my sister's Nook STR was a complete dud. It kept locking up, wouldn't hold a charge, wouldn't turn on half the time... My father's started having these problems later. The (lack of) customer support they received really started putting a bad taste in my mouth with regards to B&N.

However, I still upgraded the the Nook Simple Touch Reader with Glowlight shortly after they released it. It was my first frontlit e-reader, and I was still excited about it. I admit, I did have hesitation about buying another device from the company, but at that time, inertia kept me with them. I could still use the device for what I needed, and the frontlight let me use it a lot more without having the need for any silly booklight attachment.

I had this STRWGL until Amazon released the Kindle Paperwhite, which I jumped on as soon as it was announced. I'd been thinking of switching to Kindle for a good bit, but hadn't been ready to give up my frontlight. Why was I so quick to abandon B&N at this point? By then, the hits against them had really built up:

1. Their customer service was deplorable.
2. They were completely out of touch with what the consumer wanted -- I would go so far as to say that they were actively working against the desires of their customers.
3. They just weren't keeping up. The huge upgrade in the quality of the device (going from Glowlight to Paperwhite) was just astonishing. Almost everything about it was better. The light, the screen, the dictionary, the user interface, the ease of use, etc.

Since then, I haven't once regretted my decision. While Amazon certainly doesn't provide me everything I want, Barnes & Noble has taken away everything I would want.

Taking away the sideloading of apps, fighting the ability to root, taking away the sd card slot on their e-ink devices (effectively removing the ability to sideload much of anything). Taking away the ability to download the books from their site. Yes, as far as I'm concerned, I am well done with Barnes and Noble on the electronics front.

[eschwartz]

Even though the Kindle never really offered those. And in fact they have now made it extraordinarily difficult to jailbreak E-Ink Kindles.

But at least Amazon tries hard to make the default experience good enough that most people don't need any of that.

[Froide]

The title of this thread is "BN What Went Wrong & When?"

Let's first address the WHEN:

What went wrong happened years ago, before BN began offering ereader-tablet hybrids. But it wasn't until BN introduced the NOOKStudy (in August 2010, which I discussed at 5:11 pm yesterday in this thread), closely followed by the NOOK Color (in 4Q2010) and then the NOOK Tablet (in 4Q2011), that evidence of salient long-held, baked-in management decision-making and cultural faults in BN's senior management team's decision-making process began manifesting themselves in painfully apparent ways to external (and some internal) stakeholders. These faults drove the company to make faux pas across multiple elements of the marketing mix - scratch that, value chain - that propelled the NOOK Division ever faster down the slippery, steepening slope of decline, with ever-increasing negative impacts.

IMO, BN, investors, and the public were all too distracted by the attractiveness and positive reception of the shiny NOOK Color and NOOK Tablet devices, which everyone from developers to reviewers to consumers (like this one) really dug, to realize the Peter Principle had set in the moment BN entered the tablet arena. BN, though a seasoned, heavyweight champion amongst B&M bookstores and a viable contender in the e-ink arena, was - despite its appealing NC and NT devices - merely a lightweight amateur in the highly competitive tablet arena, outclassed by a diverse lineup of nimbler, heavier weight, or more seasoned competitors. To complete the boxing analogy, BN's NOOK Division has, from the time it entered the tablet fray, made a flurry of moves that seem punch-drunk.

Now, WHAT WENT WRONG:

IMO, a few salient things that went wrong were the NOOK Division's:

• Propensity to ignore - rather than solicit and respond effectively to - competitive and market intelligence, requests, and feedback from target stakeholders. (Examples: its boneheaded moves with NOOKStudy and Yuzu, that I posted about yesterday, and the many years the NOOK Division has ignored requests to offer more user-friendly shelves or tags, that could be saved as well as used on other devices).
• Adoption of a walled garden ecosystem without first - or at least quickly thereafter - putting in place the Key Success Factors needed to cultivate its success (e.g., a large, competitively priced, and consistently growing catalog of apps that target stakeholders actually want)
• Decision, despite customer complaints about both the dearth and selection of available NOOK apps, to price many NOOK apps higher than those offered by competitors and not offer, in addition, the option to choose ad-supported freebie versions (as say, Google Play does)
• Making moves that alienated its target stakeholders (e.g., forcing the automatic, over-the-air 1.4.1. update to NC and NT devices in December 2011 that removed users' prior ability to install and update third-party apps on their device, and that broke root for those who'd gone that extra step to customize their device.)
• Partitioning of device memory in a way that demonstrates either ignorance of and/or blatant disregard for users who desire to sideload non-NOOK content (though, to BN's credit, the company later dealt with backlash by making it possible for NT users to reconfigure their device's internal memory/storage.)
• Failure to adequately train all NOOK Customer Support and NOOK Technical Support staff to deal with commonly encountered technical issues, and to ensure the support staff knew and honestly informed customers that the NOOKStudy app and e-textbooks designed for that app cannot be read on an ereader, including a NOOK.

[ZodWallop]

I'm not an expert, but from reading through this thread, it seems that B&N would have been much better off if they had just:

A: turned Fictionwise into their online store, simply using Ctrl+F to slap their name over anything that said Fictionwise

B: focused on eReaders rather than tablets

They turned their latest (last?) eReader into a Kindle-clone, but they have nowhere near Amazon's ecosystem. Without the physical page turn buttons, ergonomic design or SD card reader, why should anyone purchase a Nook over a Kindle?

I continue to use and love a Simple Touch with Glowlight, but I manage it with Calibre and stopped buying books from B&N when I lost the ability to yank the DRM off of them. I wonder how many Nook readers like me are out there?

[conan50]

The nook hardware was pretty good, until the latest devices. Yet their online service was its own kind of hell, especially compared to Amazon. Like being in a bad relationship, over time there were fewer and fewer reasons to stay. Always wanted B&N to do well, hoped they would offer Amazon some real competition, but there is some ingrained, crippling character flaw in their management that made it apparent they could not help but drive nook off of a cliff.

[cpegg]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I continue to use and love a Simple Touch with Glowlight, but I manage it with Calibre and stopped buying books from B&N when I lost the ability to yank the DRM off of them. I wonder how many Nook readers like me are out there?

At least one. I have the original Nook ST and the Glowlight, but I haven't purchased books from B&N since they messed with their DRM. I simply wrote them off. It would take a lot to motivate me to even visit the B&N website, but my most recent Amazon book purchases were late last night.

Amazon, are you paying attention? Keep your current picturesque garden wall if you must, that may well keep a majority of your customers in, but please don't put up barbed wire that'll only keep the rest of us out.

[Lemurion]

You can really see it when you compare the Nook HD+ to the Samsung Nook Tablets. The 10.1 in particular is a real waste, down over 100ppi.