Barnes and Noble has been selling Samsung branded tablets with Nook software since 2014. Originally the bookseller committed to selling over one million tablets in the first year, but due to lackluster demand they never came close. According to recent SEC filing it looks like Barnes and Noble has just committed to a new three year deal with Samsung.
The new agreement calls for Barnes and Noble to sell ten million dollars worth of Samsung hardware or pay the difference out of their own pockets. If B&N decides to release two tablets in 2016 they will have to sell twenty million dollars worth, if they sell less than that they will be taking a loss and have to pay Samsung anyways.
I was never a fan of the Samsung branded tablets because there was no Nook branding anywhere on the hardware and they looked fairly generic. The only thing that Nook did for these devices was to preload in a number of e-reading and e-book management apps. I have serious doubts that Barnes and Noble will meet the new quota. In all honestly, they should just abandon selling tablets all together and just focus on e-ink readers.
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.
