What would bring Nook back from the dead?

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Speed reading through the racks?

(Usually) One of those thick manga volumes can be read through pretty quickly. So they would read several volumes in a sitting. Which made a mess and they tended to be inconsiderate of other people and use of space. Most teens are, but other teens tended to pull out fewer books at a time than the manga fans.

One socially awkward guy that would wear a Naruto headband was the worst.

We also had a guy whose mental chemistry seemed a bit off. I remember one time he ran at the balcony railing (the store was two floors) and I thought he was going to jump over it.

Originally Posted by fjtorres

With bags of dirty laundry?
Used to be me once.
I won't throw stones.

I know right? My Mom used to say jokingly they should create a drive-up window where I could drop off my laundry and pick up a meal and some extra cash, then return to school.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

That's what Apple calls their ebook app and store now.

I wonder how long it will take them to start suing all of the other stores because they are also selling "books"

Shari

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by NickyWithNook

I accidentally bought a book twice - I'm not sure if I clicked "buy" twice or if it was an error on their part - and I emailed them immediately asking them to remove one of the purchases. It took way too much effort, but I did get them to refund that purchase, but then periodically they would take the book off my account, and I'd have to email them to tell them that I had paid for it and it had been refunded because I'd paid twice. Every time it was too much work to get that book returned to my account. Finally, it went on sale cheap on Kindle and I bought it there.

It shouldn't have been so much work, and they shouldn't be going through my account and "fixing" it over and over again so I have to re-establish every time that I legitimately own the book. It's frustrating and a sign of very bad customer service IMO.

I accidentally bought a ebook recently that could not be downloaded to my Nook Simple Touch, and immediately requested a refund, and the CSR only grudgingly gave me a refund, and implied that if it happened again, I wouldn't be able to get a refund. I went over to Kobo, and bought the same book without a problem.

I still buy a few ebooks at B&N when they aren't discountable at Kobo, and they aren't likely to have a bunch of images (e.g., cookbooks), because I can get discounted gift cards with my Discover rewards. However, I've been discovering that the Windows 8/10 Nook app downloads some cookbooks as encrypted PDFs, and some ebooks can't be downloaded to the NST.

I don't foresee going back to the Nook unless
1) They bring back the microSD slot (I need 128GB to store all my books)
2) They stop making it so hard to copy ebooks over to a non-B&N reader (one of their dumbest ideas, IMHO)
3) They implement price matching (I usually price match at Kobo several times a month)
4) They do refunds when appropriate (Amazon makes it really easy to get refunds of ebooks)

Do they still let you sample ebooks for 30 minutes in the store? I haven't tried it in years.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by maximus83

Well said, I don't care about absolutely bottom dollar, as long as the book isn't ridiculously higher. Selection and DeDRM, as well as a good overall experience and customer service, are what matter most to me. When Google or Kobo has a book that's close to the Amazon price, I will buy from them just for the delight of annoying Amazon and slowing their March toward 100% monopoly. :-)

When Amazon has a lower price, I price match at Kobo so I get a 10% discount from Amazon's price. I buy ebooks often enough that I don't worry about the refund being store credit.

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

When Amazon has a lower price, I price match at Kobo so I get a 10% discount from Amazon's price. I buy ebooks often enough that I don't worry about the refund being store credit.

Good tip, I'll have to try that and makes it worth shopping there more often than I have been. The last few times I've tried to get somewhat niche nonfiction works in philosophy, or literary studies, Kobo didn't carry them though, but Google Play did and Amazon carries virtually everything I ever look for (if available as an ebook).

[tzirbel]

Barnes and Nobel seems to exhibit self destructive behavior from a business sense which I believe comes from upper management making decisions in a vacuum. I initially started off with nook due to them buying fictionwise which had bought peanut press. I purchased a lot from peanut press and loved the company.
I did a lot of beta testing for mobi-pocket when it first came out and it had a lot of promise but then they were bought out by Amazon.
I like the fact that Nook choose an open standard. I believe the selling points should be based on other factors like price, customer service, quality of the reader, etc….
Even if nook books where DRM’ed I could purchase non DRM’ed books from other places and they would natively just work without conversion. The Nook hardware, at the beginning, was innovative and just worked.
After years of mismanagement of nook I started to worry about my and my wife’s nook collection. Would we have access to it in the future? This was a significant investment of thousands of books. The only way to guaranty that was to have complete control over the content we have paid for.
Thanks to some individuals hard work on Anti-DRM tools and Calibre (wonderful ETL tool) I have come to realize that format of the data is almost irrelevant. Using Calibre I can convert to what ever my needs are.
Since discovering Calibre I since changed to Kobo Hardware. Nook hardware has not kept up to my needs and the Forma and Clara work very well. (I seem not to suffer from all the issues others are having with those devices.) My wife switched to Samsung tablets not sold by B&N. We still in frequently buy from Barnes and Nobel but only due to the ease I can strip off the DRM. But we also buy from a wide variety of stores now.
Barnes and Nobel started off with something great and managed to destroy most of what they built. I think to appease publishers who are clinging to a very outdated model and would rather destroy electronic publishing than to change a model that has been so good to them in the past. Barnes and Noble has not found a way to appease both publisher and consumer like Amazon and Kobo have.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by tzirbel

Barnes and Nobel seems to exhibit self destructive behavior from a business sense which I believe comes from upper management making decisions in a vacuum...

Barnes and Nobel started off with something great and managed to destroy most of what they built. I think to appease publishers who are clinging to a very outdated model and would rather destroy electronic publishing than to change a model that has been so good to them in the past. Barnes and Noble has not found a way to appease both publisher and consumer like Amazon and Kobo have.

I agree with you there. B&N management wrecked a business they likely never understood.

I like the fact that Nook choose an open standard. I believe the selling points should be based on other factors like price, customer service, quality of the reader, etc….

Even if nook books where DRM’ed I could purchase non DRM’ed books from other places and they would natively just work without conversion. The Nook hardware, at the beginning, was innovative and just worked.

Nook hardware has not kept up to my needs and the Forma and Clara work very well.

Like you, I bought into Nook because of the open format they were using. I also thought their hardware was just nicer than the competition.

I think their hardware is still ahead of the competition. The Glowlight Plus was a premium looking device that offered waterproofing in a 6" device for the same price as the Kindle Paperwhite. I still use my Plus regularly and find the design appealing.

The Glowlight 3 has a nicer looking screen than the Clara and page turn buttons. And there weren't hardware issues like Clara's 'lightbleed'.

The problem with Nook is the software side. They gave you an 8GB hard drive, but then decided to partition the bulk of it to only B&N purchased content. And the software is very slow and tends to have trouble dealing with sideloaded books.

[Scarpad]

i was in my local B&N the other day first time in a while, and there were no signs of the ereaders. normally they are front and center when you walk in, and they were no where i could see

[darryl]

Originally Posted by Scarpad

i was in my local B&N the other day first time in a while, and there were no signs of the ereaders. normally they are front and center when you walk in, and they were no where i could see

Nate over at the Digital Reader had a nice April Fools joke about B&N selling Nook to Author Solutions. Sadly, it fooled many people who didn't look at the date because such is B&N's reputation that it is by no means totally inconceivable as it should be.

[barryem]

It fooled me. Worse, I told several people about it. So it also made a fool of me.

I really think bloggers should be more responsible.

Barry

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by barryem

It fooled me. Worse, I told several people about it. So it also made a fool of me.

I really think bloggers should be more responsible.

Barry

If you read all the way to the end it does say "P.S. April Fools."

[darryl]

He may well have got me to if I hadn't looked at the date. It is all to plausible.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by darryl

Nate over at the Digital Reader had a nice April Fools joke about B&N selling Nook to Author Solutions. Sadly, it fooled many people who didn't look at the date because such is B&N's reputation that it is by no means totally inconceivable as it should be.

Would you be surprised that I actually gathered the parts of the press release (it's mostly copied from other press releases) for last April Fools?

I didn't have the energy to follow through, so I shelved it. The post was probably better for the wait; I only added the history of the Nook and the financial details Sunday night.

[darryl]

I enjoyed the joke Nate. But it was all too plausible. B&N seems to keep limping along but I can't see it lasting much longer.