Barnes and Noble has been scaling back on selling e-books all over the world. In the last twelve months the bookseller has closed their Windows app that allowed Europeans to buy and read e-books and they also shuttered their dedicated Nook bookstore in the United Kingdom. The Nook App Store and Nook Video store were both abandoned many people are concerned. Is Barnes and Noble Nook doomed?
A month ago Good e-Reader conducted an online poll and 717 people responded. 30% of the respondents believe that Barnes and Noble will continue to endure in the US market, selling both e-readers and e-books.
18.13% believe that Barnes and Noble will stop selling both e-readers and tablets. 10.74% think that they will just stop making e-readers, 10.32% think they will stop selling tablets and only 1.81% say that they will give up on e-books altogether. 28.31% said that Barnes and Noble will stop making tablets, e-readers and also give up on e-books altogether.
I think that Barnes and Noble simply suffers from tremendous mismanagement in the Nook division. The company has gone through so many different CEO’s in recent years and there is a severe lack of vision. Almost every executive that was in charge of the Nook division for the first three years of operation have all been fired. It remains to be seen if Nook will endure but they continue to lose traction in the e-book arena against Amazon, Apple, Google and Kobo. The Nook hardware design has been outsourced to Netronix and the software has been outsourced to India. It remains to be seen if Nook can ever regain the market share it has lost.
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.