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Looking for a niche with the Nook
Barnes & Noble's "Nook" e-reader.
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Kai Ryssdal: The holiday shopping season is getting going, anemic though it may turn out to be. There's a lot of buzz about electronic book readers out there. Amazon just upgraded its Kindle recently. Today Barnes & Noble joined the e-reader crowd with the Nook. What does it have that the Kindle and the others don't? Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman turns that page.
MITCHELL HARTMAN: The Nook's wireless so you can buy and download books fast. Just like the Kindle. Plus, it has a split screen: color for photos and touch-screen commands, black-and-white for text. The Kindle, just black and white.
The Nook's got another feature too, for all those consumers who still love to own and share books.
Sarah Rotman Epps follows the e-reader market at Forrester Research.
SARAH ROTMAN EPPS: In the physical world you can lend a book to a friend, and you can't read that book while your friend has it. That's something similar that they'll be setting up, with the ability to lend your friend an e-book and not have access to it, but be able to share the pleasure of reading that book.
CARL HOWE: The idea that a consumer can lend a book to someone else is a piece of consumer behavior that nobody else has really picked up on yet.
That's Carl Howe, a consumer technology analyst with The Yankee Group. He says the social aspect of the Nook, plus Barnes & Noble's huge online catalog, will help it compete with Amazon.
But neither may be enough to get consumers to embrace the technology en masse.
I caught up with Catherine Rigsby at a bookstore in Portland, Ore. She'd just plunked down $200. She is considering an e-reader.
CATHERINE RIGSBY: I'm enticed by it's easier to carry one little reader than 10 books like we have right here. But again I like the physical, tactile sensation of reading and holding that book.
Rigsby says she's also put off by the price. The Kindle and Nook are at the low end: $259. But analysts say e-readers probably need to get under $200 to really take off.
In Portland, I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
Regarding the program segment "Looking for a niche with the Nook" I heard this segment on "Marketplace" last night (on KUOW Seattle), speaking about e-books and the Nook reader from Barnes & Noble. To my mind, the ability to 'lend' an e-book to a friend is one of the least useful aspects of these devices, and certainly not one that's going to get die-hard ink-on-dead-trees fanatics like me to make the switch.
I typically read 5-6 books per month, mostly in mass-market paperback or occasionally borrowed from my local library. I never buy online, preferring brick & mortar retailers. I've been considering a Kindle or similar device for some time, mostly for the convenience factor. I detest lugging several pounds of books with me to work (where I often have downtime), for long flights or waits at the airport, and a Kindle, with several titles already loaded, would definitely lighten my load. But it definitely won't relieve my itch to actually own the paper book. One of my most treasured possessions is a signed 1st edition Stephen King. How do you get a signed copy of an e-book? And the thought of buying a particular title twice is at serious odds with my frugal New England upbringing.
Now, if Amazon or B&N were to offer a free (or iTunes-themed $1) e-book copy with the purchase of an actual paper book (hardcover or paperback), I'd seriously consider getting an e-reader. Not having to choose between the whiz-bang-take-it-on-the-road convenience of the reader or the curl-up-by-the-fire-on-a-cold-rainy-Seattle-night feel of a paper book would be priceless! On the other hand, if, when browsing the e-book listings, I decided to take a chance and purchase an e-book from an unfamiliar author and found myself loving it, Amazon or B&N would be well served to offer a discount on the actual paper volume. This would only increase sales, because I'm sure that I'm not the only fan of ink-on-dead-trees books. The store would not necessarily incur much additional cost for the e-book distribution, since it's just data which, by its very nature, is easy to distribute. The availability of newspapers and magazines on the devices is also very enticing.
Please don't think of me as some kind of wacko Luddite, opposed to technology for technology's sake. When I was required to carry a Blackberry for work, I spent my downtime reading selections from the Baen free library of e-books. (I own many print titles that are featured on that site, and it was, in two cases, responsible for me seeking out paper copies of books I read on the site first.) It was most refreshing to be able to read wherever I happened to be, and I wished that I could access all of my book collection electronically. That's the only other thing holding me back from making the e-book commitment. I certainly don't want to spend anywhere from $2 to $10 per title (over however many thousands of titles I own) to get the e-book versions. And then, how would I go back and re-read a favorite book that's out of print?
I recognize that these e-readers are the eventual wave of the future, but if the designers, publishers, and retailers want to see the future sooner rather than later, the points raised will have to be answered eventually.
I'm not sure what I'm hoping to accomplish with this rant, but I appreciate your taking the time to read it. My hope is that the publishers and retailers will get together to accommodate both the old and new schools of readers and realize that they have one thing in common; the love of the printed word.
Stephen Marche's "The Book That Contains All Books," in the WSJ on-line (accessed 10/18/2009), gives succinct, history-based argument for the eventual dominance of, if not the Kindle, then its more technically advanced progeny This will eventually BE the physical object that we mean when we say "book." It's the next format in line: clay tablet -> scroll -> codex -> moveable typle -> ebook. The writing is on the screen. XH
