The latest E-Reader News has Best Buy announcing today that they will now be carrying the Barnes and Noble Nook Starting April 18th at 1,070 different stores across North America.
This new deal with Best Buy stores will increase the Nook’s availability and ability to compete with the recently launched Apple iPad, a portable computing and entertainment system that also functions as an Electronic Reader and is sold at Best Buy in addition to Apple stores.
Best Buy is working very hard to differentiate the company from other retailers such as Amazon and Wal-Mart as the leading provider of Electronic Readers. Adding the Barnes and Noble Nook to its growing inventory such as Sony E-Readers, Best Buy is poised to be a sales destination for holiday shopping.
Barnes & Noble tried to launch the Nook in October of 2009 but due to delays in production and a law suit with rival Spring Design with their Alex E-Reader Barnes and Noble missed out on the pivotal holiday rush that saw Amazon sell close to a million Kindles.
The company is focusing on the growth of the e-book market to overcome a long-term sales decline in physical books. Best Buy will also carry the Barnes and Noble E-Book software on mobile devices that it sells and on new computers to easily access the Book Store.
This is a savvy move, because the Barnes and Noble e-book store can be read on any of the Sony and I-PAD formats, meanwhile the Amazon Store books are only compatible with Kindle Devices.
We hope this is not the only big partnership agreement between companies to get e-readers more accessible to the public.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
