B&N to close Nook offices

[Katsunami]

LOL. At one of the photography exhibitions I attended in the past, I asked one of the Zeiss people outright:

"Why are your lenses so much less expensive than Leica's? Their lenses are often 4x the price of yours."

The answer was surprising:

- "Because Leica's lenses are better than ours."

*** JAW DROP ***

But then he said:

- "However, you must take the following into account. If you take a 100% lens to be perfect, our lenses score 98%. Leica's lenses score 99%, but are 4x more expensive. A 100% lens would have an almost infinite price. We can and do create lenses approaching 100% perfection*, but not for the consumer market. In our opinion, the price/performance ratio would not not be right."

There you have it, and it's fully understandable.

(* Zeiss creates lenses for use in NASA deep space exploration telescopes, and for use in ASML's lithography machines, for example.)

[murg]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

LOL. At one of the photography exhibitions I attended in the past, I asked one of the Zeiss people outright:

"Why are your lenses so much less expensive than Leica's? Their lenses are often 4x the price of yours."

The answer was surprising:

- "Because Leica's lenses are better than ours."

*** JAW DROP ***

But then he said:

- "However, you must take the following into account. If you take a 100% lens to be perfect, our lenses score 98%. Leica's lenses score 99%, but are 4x more expensive. A 100% lens would have an almost infinite price. We can and do create lenses approaching 100% perfection*, but not for the consumer market. In our opinion, the price/performance ratio would not not be right."

There you have it, and it's fully understandable.

(* Zeiss creates lenses for use in NASA deep space exploration telescopes, and for use in ASML's lithography machines, for example.)

Yeah, but B&N is still struggling to hit 1%.

[Difflugia]

Originally Posted by Conan46

Anyone have any luck with nook4pc running under wine on linux? I can never get past the password to sign in.

Use winetricks to install IE7 or IE8. Run winecfg and add wininet and winsock to the libraries tab set to "(native, builtin)".

The builtin libraries are missing one of the https protocols that NOOK for PC requires.

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by Difflugia

Use winetricks to install IE7 or IE8. Run winecfg and add wininet and winsock to the libraries tab set to "(native, builtin)".

The builtin libraries are missing one of the https protocols that NOOK for PC requires.

Thanks for that info!
I did finally get Nook Study to work under Wine.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by murg

Yeah, but B&N is still struggling to hit 1%.

I'm not surprised, seeing how they handled FictionWise (at the point they acquired it, it was possibly the largest ebook retailer in the world), and I also don't understand how you can "reaffirm your commitment" while at the same time outsourcing core components to some forgein company.

I can already see people's faces contort in fear and loathing if they ever need to contact the help desk and find out it's in India. I understand that in the English speaking world, having Indian help desks do the support is one of the most loathed things by customers.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I'm not surprised, seeing how they handled FictionWise (at the point they acquired it, it was possibly the largest ebook retailer in the world), and I also don't understand how you can "reaffirm your commitment" while at the same time outsourcing core components to some forgein company.

I can already see people's faces contort in fear and loathing if they ever need to contact the help desk and find out it's in India. I understand that in the English speaking world, having Indian help desks do the support is one of the most loathed things by customers.

Second-largest. The Kindle Store was probably bigger.

But even so, Fictionwise was a popular store.

[MGlitch]

I've experienced Nook 'customer support' and Kobo customer support. This was, of course, prior to BN outsourcing a few days ago.

With Nook I'd get people who were clueless about the product. They didn't understand terms like 'download'. They didn't know how the device worked or what it could do. I was also hung up on when calling in, and disconnected when using their online chat. Toward the end of using my Nook I generally tried to resolve the issues that arose with third party forums like this one, and BN's own which are basically just other Nook owners.

With Kobo I got answers. I wasn't hung up on. The biggest hitch was getting a tracking number for my H2O, which did have me calling back a few times. But that was (is?) apparently an issue that plagued Kobo at the time.

I can't see this latest change as something which will change anything about the Nook experience. I almost think BN is doing this to intentionally drive away the Nook customers they still have so that they can just shut Nook down entirely.

[the.Mtn.Man]

Now would be a good time to get your ebooks out, if you can.

And this is precisely why I will never buy ebooks in a proprietary format or with DRM.