Clearly Barnes & Noble wishes to make the most of the coming holiday season with its new Nook Color and is making an all out effort towards that. Like coaxing manufacturers based in China to produce as many as 18,000 Nook Colors everyday which Barnes & Noble believes will be needed to cope up with a likely rise in demand.
Barnes & Noble Chairman Len Riggio said, “B&N is manufacturing Nook Colors at a rate of 18,000 per day and is loading up a 747 every four to five days to bring devices to the U.S. from China.” He further added: “We’ll be up against it to produce enough for the [holiday] season.” Some simple maths based on the figures that Riggio came up with and what you have is some startling figures to work with, an incredible half a million Nook Colors lapped up in the holiday season this year itself.
Riggio however is of the opinion that demand for e-book reader will come down sharply by the time its 2012 before reaching a peak in 2011. He also stated prices of future e-reader will continue their downward trend even as more and more features find their way into the device while the device too becomes more technologically advanced. “It’s the history of technology. Function improves and prices decrease. It’s inevitable,” said Riggio.
Nook Color is the latest device to enter the Barnes & Noble products list and is the first from the company to feature a full color display. Its runs Android 2.1 and features a 7 inch LCD capacitive touch screen. The device can even be classified as a tablet PC although its makers are content with it being just an e-reader. But then, that hasn’t stopped many an innovative thinker from hacking into the device to discover its tablet qualities.
In the end, whether be it a tablet or an e-reader, the fact is, the Nook Color is very special to the company which can be summed up in what Riggio had to say about the device: “is the first time in the history of the company we made a technology leap over our competitors. From that perspective, it’s very gratifying.” Perhaps, the Nook Color is the harbinger of a proper full blown tablet PC from Barnes & Noble.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.
