October 27, 2009
The Locative Value of the Nook
Tim notes that the Barnes & Noble’s Nook is taking a decidedly different marketing strategy than the Kindle:
The promise of the Kindle is that you can buy and read books any where at all — that is, nowhere in particular. The Amazon store has no location. You read the books on your screen, and they are technically stored on your device, but effectively, the books are likewise nowhere.
Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, is still committed to the idea that books have that they are most properly browsed and bought and read in specific locations. They say: yes, you can use your Nook anywhere — but the very best place to use it is in one of our stores. What’s more: as long as you’re in the store, you can read as much of as many books as you want. Just like if you were flipping the pages. That’s huge!
Why is this huge? Well, for the same reason geo-locating phones and augment reality are. Technology highest goal has been to destroyed our sense of distance, the vastness of space. Now, however, technology has an opportunity to redeem itself by augmenting the depth of space, by causing us to be more, as Tim says, “location aware.”
Anything that helps us recall our physicality is a good thing, a very good thing.
comments
Wait a minute. So Barnes and Noble is saying you can go into one of their stores and read their books on your handy electronic device? I’m sure I’m missing something here. What is the advantage of that, as opposed to browsing the aisles and reading the books themselves, if you’re in the bookstore? All bookstores have physical nooks for just that purpose.
Help me out on this one, Andrew.
I still can’t get over “nook,” but then I’m still giggling about “Wii”
C-Scroggz: you gotta keep in mind that B&N doesn’t necessarily have their entire selection available in any given store. Maybe this lets you read a book they aren’t carrying at the moment?
1. What Dave said (although, ebooks are far from common yet, many publishers seem uncomfortable with them)
2. It’s smart from a marketing perspective (if you haven’t read Tim’s analysis, you should) because it connects people via a device with a physical place. This is an interesting business model that is wildly different than the Kindle.
3. If it is successful, it will get companies to think creatively about how to connect devices to locations.
I am not suggesting that this should/will replace the more classical way of buying and using books. In fact, I have argued the opposite.
Thanks, y’all. I need a bookie for my nookie!
Connecting a device to a particular physical space is certainly an interesting concept, but I’ll be *really* surprised if this Barnes & Noble model takes off. I’ve spent my entire working life managing bookstores and libraries, and I’m having trouble meshing this model with known behavior patterns of readers/consumers/information seekers. I could be completely wrong, though–I guess time will tell!
Dave, if the idea is that B&N would have books available electronically that aren’t in their regular inventory, then something is definitely missing in the whole equation. They won’t make money by promoting their electronic access model within their physical stores without also catering to people who want physical books–people will just get angry that they have to buy a device in order to access the book electronically, when what they really wanted was the physical book. And for those who only want the electronic book, many will be put off by the idea of having to go to a particular place to browse or read it for free. If you can afford to buy the device, you can afford to purchase the download.
In my library–where most of our information is available electronically–we have a handful of people who prefer to come in and access our e-books and e-journals here, but the overwhelming majority of people prefer to access them off-site. The people who do want to come in are interested either in finding a place to read without distraction or in socializing–and, if the latter, they really aren’t reading. I’ll be very interested to see how this pans out for B&N.
I suspect you’re right about the Nook not taking off, but if it does, then it isn’t because it is worse than the Kindle since both allow for remote purchase as well.
I also do not foresee myself buying one either. Not yet.
I agree, Andrew. And I’m not buying one yet, either.
Could it be that B & N’s goal is to get you in their space to sell something else? Coffee, greeting cards, magazines, music, DVDs and something to do with Harry Potter
Bingo. B&N then becomes a place for an experience before it’s a bookstore.
There are washaterias that sell mixed drinks; home repair centers that offer free grilled hotdogs out in the parking lot;: circuses that offer free rides on the elephants. Bookstores, though, have a huge costs associated with, well–a huge stock of books in a physical space. All retail businesses are scrambling to find ways to expand the range of sales to compensate for reduced traffic flow and more miserly customers. For people interested in sales, first and foremost, electronic copies of books are attractive primarily because they undercut the need to have the fixed place, the fixed stock, and the associated shipping and handling costs. If bookstores want to entertain as a way of making money–why not hire strippers to do poetry readings while crotch-rubbing a pole? Or maybe–open a fucking restaurant with free books on every table for conversation starters. Try selling gas these days without making most of your money from fountain drinks, bags of chips, and lotto tickets.
Heh. I think you are more or less spot on, Daryl. I think the real service to print material should be (is going to be?) the Espresso Book Machine.
I’m still interested. I think the Nook, like the Kindle, has real possibilities for folks on long trips (or job stints) to non-English-speaking countries, who can load the thing up before they leave, or for folks like me who want to live light.
There’s no doubt that e-readers are convenient for transporting a lot of books if you want to travel light. But if you’re concerned about weight, why carry an e-reader—a single-use device—at all, when you can also store and read books on a cell phone or iPod Touch, which millions of people are already carrying with them all the time? The reading experience sucks, sure, but not as much as you might think, relative to other methods of reading e-books. My biggest problem with reading on an iPod is one that’s shared (albeit to a lesser degree) by most other single-page e-reading interfaces.