Marion Manekar says the new e-reader from Barnes & Noble, the Nook, is better than Amazon’s Kindle and therefore could break Barnes & Noble as a printed bookseller.
Marion Manekar says the new e-reader from Barnes & Noble, the Nook, is better than Amazon’s Kindle and therefore could break Barnes & Noble as a printed bookseller.
Seems unlikely to me, even if they are selling the Nook at a serious loss. I can’t see e-readers driving printed books out of the market, at least not in the next ten years, so the only issue is that the Nook might be sufficiently popular that (if they are selling it at a loss) B&N goes bankrupt. But that’s not going to happen—they can always choose to raise their prices. Moreover, the more popular it gets, the larger the production runs they can do…and the cheaper it will be to manufacture.
The Nook *might* be a Kindle-killer, and if it’s any good at all it’ll certainly change the e-reader landscape. But I don’t see it changing the book-buying landscape significantly.
Maybe I didn’t read the article clearly enough, but I thought the idea was not that it would changing the book-buying landscape, but that it would seriously undermine Barnes & Noble in particular. The people who will buy from B&N will begin buying only Nook selection, and readers who don’t like B&N won’t buy anything at all. If that occurs within a business context that isn’t treading water well enough while selling mostly printed book, and you could make a tired company weaker.