Barnes and Noble Sees Amazon’s Kindle, Raises with the Nook
Nook takes everything good from Amazon’s Kindle and leaves all the bad behind, but is this really a game changing event?
Amazon shot for simplicity and what they created was a simple product. Yes, it was improved with the Kindle 2, but Barnes and Noble raised the bar considerably with the release of the nook.
While Amazon’s Kindle is still the market leader, it’s grayscale-only screen makes Barnes and Noble’s nook’s color screen look fantastic. I also features iPhone-like touch screen and finger manipulation. Just flick your finger and the screen scrolls just as it does on Apple’s iPhone.
Both ebook readers are similarly priced at $259 so removing price from the comparison, you are truly choosing between hardware and software options at this point along with the back-end service and ebook availability. Both are strong companies who share roots in selling books, but Barnes and Nobles is exclusively a book store and that may be why they are able to offer up to three times as many ebooks than Amazon.
And while we are comparing nook’s color screen to Apple’s iPhone, let us remember that Apple has yet to release an ebook reader or even a touch screen tablet. iPhone users can download and use both Kindle and Barnes and Noble apps to read ebooks on the iPhone, but Apple has yet to release a standalone ebook hardware platform. While the nook has made improvements to the ebook reader, it is not necessarily a game changer like the way the iPod changed MP3 players and the iPhone changed cell phones forever. Can Apple do it again and if so, will that be the game changer?
You might want to ask why you would want the game changed at all.
Barnes and Noble and Amazon are both releasing solid products that do one thing well: read ebooks. No, they can’t surf the web well, but they can download ebooks from the web just fine, which is exactly what they are for. If you want to search the web, there is already hardware for that. Most people can even surf the web on their cell phones, for example. So this push for a game changing device may only be a play on our human nature to always want the grass on the other side of the fence, never being satisfied. This fuels our economic engine and spurs innovation, but sometimes we need to stop and appreciate what we have now and that it is pretty cool and not always dismiss the present while we are waiting for the future to arrive.
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