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eBooks, News March 12, 2010

Barnes and Noble Muddies Their Brand Further


(image courtesy engadget)

Samsung has announced their E60 ebook reader, a basic 6 inch eInk device with a touchscreen and wifi…and it will be tied into the Barnes and Noble ecosystem. Honestly, I don’t entirely understand how this is a win for B&N or Samsung. The E60 is stuck living in the shadow of the nook, and Barnes and Noble ends up confusing their brand further.

In my opinion, Samsung would have benefited more from tying in with a store like Kobo Books. Kobo has made it their philosophy that they do not want to tie down to one reader, but be a content provider to all kinds of devices. Partnering with B&N means playing second fiddle to the nook constantly. Talk Barnes and Noble and ebooks, and everyone knows nook first and foremost. While it’s great to get the content boost from a large store, there are other dance partners out there. Plus, B&N says they’ll be opening their DRM up to all Adobe-compatible devices, so eventually that compatibility is not going to be anything special. And the pricing is a bit high for what you get. For $299, you get a touchscreen enabled reader with wifi, so you can take handwritten notes, which is nice. But on the other hand, that’s still higher than the nook, which has the potential for far more interesting functionality through rooting.

Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble needs to decide what they want. Are they going to be a content provider, like Kobo, or a single-store strategy like Amazon? If the majority of their branding is going to surround their hardware (as it has now), then run with that. Amazon has made themselves successful by clearly and carefully building their brand and focusing their energies. B&N isn’t building a clear brand, they’re building a “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” strategy. They’ve got the eReader store, Fictionwise, and their own B&N ebook store, all of which sell “eReader” books. And they can’t seem to unify under one DRM structure, or even bring their pricing in line with the rest of the marketplace.

Look, we saw from the Changewave survey that the iPad has been dominating mindshare. And the nook is barely holding onto a sliver of that. Samsung’s reader may dominate a small portion of the marketplace, but it’s not going to make a major impression, and Barnes and Noble needs to focus their energy. If it is on content over hardware, then open up the DRM to any interested readers and run with it. If it’s hardware, keep working on the nook firmware and focus more energy on the nook 2. Historically, companies have had a very poor track records when trying straddle two different marketing strategies; look at Apple during the clone days and Palm when their OS was licensed, sold, rebought, sold again…

What do you think about the current state of ebook readers on the market? Share your thoughts below!

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About Carly Z

View all posts by Carly Z
Carly has been a gadget fiend for a long time, going back to her first PDA (a Palm M100). She quickly went from researching what PDA to buy to following tech news closely and keeping up with the latest and greatest stuff. She loves writing about ebooks because they combine her two favorite activities; reading anything and everything, and talking about fun new tech toys. What could be better?
  • nathaniel the greatest

    There is an upside to tying the E6 to the B&N store: the E6 can still use DRMed Epub from any other store including Kobo (except for Apple, that is). If the E6 were tied to Kobo, then it wouldn’t be able to read ebooks form B&N.

    To put it simply, E6 is using the next gen of Adobe DRM and can still use the current gen. This was a good move.

  • gous

    I’m afraid I disagree. Lets look at your statements: 1) ‘They should have gone with Kobo’. My reply: Kobo who? Even myself, stuck in an unknown city in a forgotten continent have heard of Barnes & Noble – admittedly I’m in the bookselling business. In the US those who could tell you anything about Kobo is what, 0.01%? Imagine: It’s Christmas, you’re in Walmart checking out ereaders, you’re interested in Samsung – large well known brand – and hearing that their bookstore of choice is B&N – large well known brand. A done deal. Samsung wants to sell ereaders & Kobo brings nothing to the table, at least in the USA.
    2)’…there are other dance partners out there’ I’d be interested to know who they are – well-known, established brands, no?
    3)’Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble needs to decide what they want’ This seems to be the heart of you argument. From my side this seems to misunderstand B&N’s strategy.It is not that different from Amazon’s really, the one big difference being that they are the content providers for other ereaders as well. Why would they do this? Here are some suggestions.a) They were never going to catch the Kindle no matter how well the nook sold initially. Amazon already had an established base of around 2.5million Kindle users before a single nook was sold.
    By being the bookstore content provider of so many ereaders they (potentially) double their customer base if, per example, all the sales of those just match those of the nook, thus giving them a much better chance of hauling in Amazon.
    b) B&N makes just about no profit on selling their nooks, by their own admission.
    One less reason to care what ereader is used, as long as B&N is the bookstore.
    c) Looking specifically at the Samsung deal, the conflict seems more apparent than real. For one the nook is only sold in-store & at BN.com. Samsung will be sold everywhere else (this is Samsung after all)! If Best Buy, Target & Walmart stock these then sales could be high, especially since I suspect that a lot of buyers might buy on name brand alone. Notice that B&N could be reaching customers that otherwise would be lost, eg those far away from a B&N store & who dislike shopping online.
    d) Hedging their bets. B&N is not a hardware company & is busy forming relationships with companies that could potentially be their hardware partners in the future.

    Well I’ve already talked too much & this is the opinions of someone far from the action, so take it with a bag of salt!

  • http://www.geardiary.com Douglas Moran

    It’s a long-shot, out there thought, but maybe B&N is taking the “is the spaghetti done?” approach to the market: just tossing a whole lot of stuff against the wall to see what sticks. And when they find it, bang-o, they’ll concentrate on that.

    It’s just a thought. But frankly, I don’t believe it for a minute. I think they’re just thrashing, trying to find a workable business model for the eBook world. They probably think that in the LCD vs. eInk debate, they’re hedging their bets but really, to me, they’re just confusing their brand. I hope they stick around, though; the market needs to the competition.

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  • Haesslich

    Is it wrong for me to say that the E60 looks like the Sony PRS-600′s fatter, WiFi-enabled cousin? Because.. it does. I don’t see enough differentiation here price-wise OR feature-wise to really compete with anyone else in the market now, even with B&N’s name behind it.

    Let’s look at the competition:

    1) Amazon’s Kindle 2/Kindle DX/Kindle International – three readers with 3G and tied into Amazon. Currently the major reader on the market. Prices are competitive or better at $259 than the $299 US price-point announced for the Samsung.

    2) Sony PRS-600 and PRS-300. Skinnier, all-metal frames. The PRS-600 is slimmer and, while without WiFi, has the touchscreen. The PRS-300 is $199 and has no touchscreen; the PRS-600 is $299.

    3) The iPad. Love it or hate it, Apple has brand recognition in consumer electronics far beyond what Samsung enjoys. For the WiFi only iPad at $499 you get 16GB, a large 10″ LCD screen, iBooks, and access to the App Store plus your existing iTunes video library. And web browsing. For more money, you also get 3G.

    4) The nook. B&N’s own supposed flagship product at $259 has a color touchscreen, WiFi support, and also supports the B&N store. It also runs on Android, and has the potential to allow customization for the geeks who want to do it, while having the gimmicky color screen for people who want to use it to navigate their libraries.

    So we’ve got a device more expensive than the nook or the Kindle, which is fatter than the Sony PRS-600 which also has a touchscreen, whose only advantage that is apparent is its eInk support… and it’ll be going head-to-head with the iPad for the consumers’ dollars. Plus there’s also the iRex and the Plastic Logic readers which are going B&N, IIRC…

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