On the last day of Book Expo America 2012, Jim Hilt Vice President of eBooks at Barnes & Noble came all the way down just to speak with us! We talked about the growing success of their e-ink reader line with the newest edition to the family, the Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight. He shares with us the evolution of the hardware from the concept stage and what made them create it. He also explains the growing synergy between their retail locations and their digital content systems, and some things we can expect moving forward.
Barnes and Noble is very well known for the Nook Color and Nook Tablet line of reading devices. He stressed the importance of tuning the ecosystem to readers first. Other companies like Amazon seem to be very focused on signing up people for Amazon Prime, but B&N has tremendous success with Nook Kids, Nook Study, Lendme, and their Android Apps. We talk a bit about how libraries play a part in B&N’s lending strategy.
This is a great interview, and he seldom does them with media organizations, so we want to sincerely thank him for making the trip down to chat with us for over an hour!
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.
