"Barnes & Noble holiday sales drop on Nook slump"

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

You really do not know what you are talking about.

It is trivial to purchase Amazon books from other vendors. You don't even have to sideload; you can e-mail them directly to your Kindle. Moreover, once you've done this, Amazon will sync it on all of your devices, so you don't lose you place when you switch from your e-reader to your tablet to your computer.

Yeah. I guess those 500 books I purchased from Baen don't actually exist, as Amazon prevents me from using them. Darn... !!!

[charmian]

Amazon had the money and the marketing in order to pull off a closed app store. And the jury is still out on how well this will work in the long term.

The Nook Color move worked in the market at the time, but Nook tablets are (except for the HD+) no longer priced at astonishingly low prices. I think to get attention they'd have to put out a tablet for $50.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by charmian

Amazon had the money and the marketing in order to pull off a closed app store.

They also didn't stop apps from other sources from being sideloaded.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Well, Amazon is doing the same thing, and being quite successful....

Amazon did *not* do the same thing.
You have always been able to sideload apps on the Fire tablets, which you still can't do on Nooks. You can easily install competing reader and Appstore apps on Fires without hacking.

And, Amazon has been successful because they actually have viable music and video services within their ecosystem so they not only make money off books and apps, they make money off media content and ads.
(Plus physical goods.)

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Amazon did *not* do the same thing.
You have always been able to sideload apps on the Fire tablets, which you still can't do on Nooks. You can easily install competing reader and Appstore apps on Fires without hacking.

And, Amazon has been successful because they actually have viable music and video services within their ecosystem so they not only make money off books and apps, they make money off media content and ads.
(Plus physical goods.)

In other words, it's not just about the presence or lack of the Google Play store that destroyed the Nook, it's about the fact that taking it away resulted in a bad experience, because they couldn't make it work.

It's the typical problem with B&N, where they fail to provide a good User Experience. Amazon does manage it, so they don't need to provide the Google Play store. The "lifeblood" of the Kindle Fire is not in sideloaded apps, it is in the apps in the Amazon appstore. Unlike the Nook, which didn't have any "lifeblood" of it's own, so removing the Google Play store was a bad idea.

[pastanley]

I used to be a nookie since the first nook came out about 4 years ago. I was getting upset about BN web site was too slow (then the nook defenders said I should switch to chrome web browser ----NOT! I will not switch browsers just to browse BN site). Amazon offered more books that BN did not have, offered them cheaper, and in come cases- free. I have begun to see BN on the downward spiral and thought it be best to ditch my nook on craigslist and move to Amazon since I already had an account there. I still go to the BN brick and mortar stores. I would personally rather buy ebooks from Amazon.

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by afv011

The sad part is that BN were ahead of the curve with the Nook Color, they caught everybody by surprise by releasing a cheap tablet (by 2010 standards) with decent performance - they tapped a section of the market that nobody else knew was there, it took Amazon about a year to respond. Unfortunately BN did not take advantage of this lead by pushing forward and instead they've now fallen behind everybody else.

Closing their devices so their store was the only source of apps, when apps are the lifeblood of these devices, was also a terrible decision. They reversed course, but by then it was too late.

At the time, I'm pretty sure getting a device without GPS, camera, etc certified for the Google Market was pretty difficult (almost impossible) due to what Google wanted standard on devices.

Still, they should have / could have swung something by the time the Kindle Fire started coming out (around the time of the Nook Tablet's release).

[kevinp]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

You have always been able to sideload apps on the Fire tablets, which you still can't do on Nooks. You can easily install competing reader and Appstore apps on Fires without hacking.

What??? Nook HD & HD+ come with Google Play and you can easily install the Kindle app from it - no need to "sideload". Get your facts straight!

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by kevinp

What??? Nook HD & HD+ come with Google Play and you can easily install the Kindle app from it - no need to "sideload". Get your facts straight!

You may not have a need to sideload but others do.
And the straight fact is you can't.
(Not without hacking.)
It is about the level of control you have on your hardware.
If you're comfy with what you have, good for you.
But need it or not, you can't easily sideload. Period.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

You may not have a need to sideload but others do.
And the straight fact is you can't.
(Not without hacking.)
It is about the level of control you have on your hardware.
If you're comfy with what you have, good for you.
But need it or not, you can't easily sideload. Period.

So, are you retracting your claim about competing reader apps, or not?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

So, are you retracting your claim about competing reader apps, or not?

What's to retract?
I said Kindle never needed hacking the way Nooks did. Past tense from the beginning.
The whole point is Amazon never restricted their tablets the way Nook did which is why Fire prospered and Nook thudded.

I seriously considered the HD+ when it first came out and it looked like there was a sideloading loophole. The moment they closed the loophole I closed the door on Nook. If they wanted to go out of their way to keep me from running apps I already owned, thrh didn't want my tablet business.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

What's to retract?

Your post #64 very strongly implies that competing reader and other appstore apps can not be installed on Nooks without hacking.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Your post #64 very strongly implies that competing reader and other appstore apps can not be installed on Nooks without hacking.

Most of the more popular alternate app stores (Amazon, Slide Me, etc.) aren't on Google Play so can't be installed on a Nook HD/HD+ without hacking since you can't sideload and even if you can install one from Play it won't work AFAIK since you need to be able to load the actual apps from the store which is like sideloading. No idea about all other reader apps, I know the one I've tried (Kindle, Kobo, Moon+ Pro) were compatible, but there are/were other various apps in the Play store, but not marked as compatible with the Nook's (even though they work fine) so still would need to be sideloaded can't say if there are some reader apps that fall into that category or not. Of course other Nook models (Tab. Color) can't sideload and don't have Play access either.

[pl001]

I didn't realize that you still can't sideload on Nook today, if that is the case. But I don't think that's a big deal since they now have Google Play. To some people here, perhaps, but not to the market in general IMO.

I agree with others, what killed them was the terrible app store on the original Nook Color, which I still own. People ran out to buy what was at the time a great tablet at a great price, only to be utterly disappointed with the wasteland which was B&N's app store and services. By the time B&N rectified that it was too late because they no longer had a device that was head and shoulders above the competition in value. That's a problem when you are a company that has little to no brand recognition in the electronics or online markets.

That said, in all reality they were doomed from the start. It would have taken more than a few better decisions to become a true competitor to Amazon. It's easy to sit here and second-guess them, but who else has been able to seriously challenge Amazon? Nobody.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by pl001

That said, in all reality they were doomed from the start. It would have taken more than a few better decisions to become a true competitor to Amazon. It's easy to sit here and second-guess them, but who else has been able to seriously challenge Amazon? Nobody.

I think their mistake was trying to copy Amazon. They don't have the content available the way Amazon does, but tried to lock things down more than Amazon did. If B&N had either gotten their content offerings up to snuff or perhaps partnered with providers of other content their stuff wouldn't have felt so locked up. The Play store may have been added too late to make a big difference. With Amazon they've got it set up so that any content you buy from them (books, movies, TV, Music, etc) can be utilized in multiple ways on multiple devices.