Why Barnes and Noble is losing my loyalty in the e-reader war

Let me start off by saying that I have loved Barnes & Noble for many years.  I remember when the first store opened in Utah, we would take the entire family there for a couple of hours, let our children read and then buy a bunch of books.  We didn’t care that it was a 20 mile drive – it was worth it.  It was the first bookstore in Utah that reminded me of Krochs and  Brentanos and the bookstores in the Chicago Loop that I would spend my lunch hours in.

For many years I have purchased an annual membership to save money on the cost of physical books and purchases in the Barnes & Noble store. That $25 investment usually was recouped in a few months because of the amount of books my family read.

Three and a half years ago I bought my first Kindle and found out how inexpensive e-books could be. (Sadly – that was back when even new release novels were $9.99 at the most). I loved my Kindle 2 and took it everywhere. Less and less was the need to  purchase physical books.  I mainly get them now if they have extensive pictures or are database reference manuals or program and project management reference books. I was still buying these in the Barnes & Noble stores until I priced them on Amazon and figured out that even with shipping thrown in, these books were cheaper to purchase off of Amazon.com than in the Barnes & Noble store with my discounts.

My friend kept trying to convince me about how great Nooks were and how much better they were than Kindles. I received a Nook Color earlier this year and have probably read about five books on the Nook.

Reason 1: I have several Kindles and like to be able to put books on multiple copies for whenever I have one available.

Reason 2: I was finding lots more free and cheap books on the Kindle from Amazon.com,  ireaderreview.com and on Facebook than I found for the Nook from Barnes & Noble.com and Facebook posts.

Reason 3: It seems to me that there are many more e-books available from Amazon than from Barnes & Noble and the prices were generally lower.

Final Reason:  I received two Barnes & Noble gift cards for my birthday last month.  I understand why Barnes & Noble won’t allow me to use the membership discount on purchasing e-readers and e-reader supplies.  However, when I called customer service, I was informed that the membership discounts also don’t apply to e-books and apps.  Well, guess what?  That is what I want to purchase.

At this point I will continue to purchase books for my Nook when they are free and when I have gift certificates.  But I will not be renewing my annual membership because I will not be able to recoup the cost of that membership in the amount of physical books I purchase (I still have far too many research books I am working through).  Barnes & Noble has lost my loyalty.  If they want to stand a chance in the e-reader wars, I think they need to reconsider this decision.  Even if they only offered 10% off on e-books and apps – I might reconsider. But 0% is a deal breaker and – while that makes me sad – I have to consider price savings when I make purchases.  Saving $25 a year allows me to buy 2 more new release novels for my Kindles.

Kindle Fire vs Nook Color

This is a comparison between the Kindle Fire and the Nook Color.  I will be doing a separate post later comparing various Kindle e-ink readers.

To start off – let me explain that I have only had the Kindle Fire for 6 days – but have spent about 20 hours testing apps, browsing the Amazon store, downloading and watching movies, and reading a book on it.

I have had the Nook Color for several months and have browsed the Barnes & Noble store, read a couple of books and tested numerous apps on this device.

Both are available for $199 at this point in time.

I’m not going to get into the technical aspects of each device – how much they weigh, memory, speed, etc. There are a huge amount of reviews and posts out there that can provide you this information.  What I am going to do is provide you with my thoughts from an average user’s point of view.

Nook Color

The Nook Color is a great device.  I absolutely love it.  The colors are sharp, the interface is easy to use.  Downloading apps and books is quick and easy. 

The overall device is nicely built.  The feel of it in my hands is great. The rounded edges are very comfortable.  I like being able to turn the device on and off with the physical button on the upper left hand side.  The volume buttons on the right side are nice and can be found by touch in the dark (the sound is very good on the device too).  I even like the “upside down ‘n’” button.

The quick information bar at the bottom of the screen is very useful.  I like seeing the time and battery level at all times.  I do a lot of  screenshots and rely on it telling me when the screenshot has been saved. (Speaking of screenshots – it is so easy to take them using the n button and the down volume button).

Email is easy to set up and use.  Browsing the Barnes & Noble store is very quick.  Browsing the internet is also very quick.  Most pages come up quite quickly.

I have not spent a lot of time rearranging my books and apps.  It is nice to be able to drag them around the bottom of the main screen. I have not bothered trying to arrange items into shelves – so cannot speak to that.

Reading a book was very nice on the Nook Color. Page turns were smooth and I was able to turn pages with either my left or right hand without any problems.  Changing fonts, screen brightness, colors – all very simple to do without reading the directions.  Using the dictionary is as simple as touching the word you want to look up.  The weight did get tiring and I had to prop the Nook against something when reading for long periods of time.

Being able to add a micro SD card is a big advantage.  You can easily up the needed memory by purchasing an additional card.  You could even have multiple cards to swap out if you really needed – just don’t try and write on them or lose them – they are very tiny!

The absolutely best thing about my Nook Color are wallpapers and live wallpapers.  I spend a lot of time on these and love being able to do what I would like to (change pictures, view slideshows, create items).  Users of Nook Colors and Nook Tablets have also expressed great interest in wallpaper apps and I have tried several from different developers and can see infinite possibilities for wallpaper development. Of course, live wallpapers are the reason I have never bothered setting up shelves. Why bother when the wallpapers are so much better?

Kindle Fire

The Kindle Fire is also a great device.  I have really enjoyed working on it this first week.

I do find it interesting that the Nook Color is turned on with a swipe from left to right and the Kindle Fire is turned on with a swipe from right to left.  They just want to confuse me.

The Kindle Fire was not as intuitive as the Nook Color at first. It took me a while to figure out how to find the settings and get it set up.  Once I got familiar with it – things became easier to use.

The design of the device is no frills – but it is very nice looking. Not as fancy as the Nook Color – but it has very clean lines.  It “feels” heavier than the Nook Color and the edges are not rounded – but overall it is well designed. My one complaint about the overall design is the physical power button being on the bottom of the device.  When reading a book last night, I found that the device would be turned off by my fingers bumping the bottom of the Kindle Fire or if I rested it against a hard surface. 

The flow from portrait to landscape mode is very smooth.  I have not had that work very well on my Nook Color – so was making myself dizzy reading from different modes to test it out.  I still need to look at the ability to lock the mode – because shifting around in bed can cause the reading mode to also shift.

Reading a book was very easy on the Kindle Fire.  Like the Nook Color – it is too heavy to read one handed for long – so I had to prop the device or hold it in two hands.  Maybe it is me – but it had a hard time recognizing taps from my left hand compared to my right hand. The right handed taps would turn the page. The left handed taps would bring up controls. Speaking of controls – very easy to change font sizes, brightness, colors, etc.

Again – I found searching the Amazon store easy to do off the device. I also found browsing the Internet easy to do. There was not really any appreciable difference between the Kindle Fire and the Nook Color browsing experience.

Since I have  a free month of Amazon Prime - I scrolled through the various free offerings available to me. I don’t really watch much television, but might test this out more to see if it will be worth subscribing to Amazon Prime for a year (another post will probably come from that). I did rent and download Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the download was quick and watching the movie was easy. 

The big downsides I can see on the Kindle Fire is the inability to change your wallpapers without rooting the device and the inability to take screenshots without setting up a development portal. I was able to load pictures on my Kindle Fire by using my USB cord from another Kindle – but could not see any easy way to do it with the charging cable that comes with the device.  It is a one piece cable and cannot connect to the computer. The Nook Color is a two piece cable that allows for both charging and connecting to a computer.

Things to consider

Ultimately – I don’t think you can go wrong with either device.  Right now the Amazon store has more android apps (although not all of them will work well on Kindle Fire) – but the apps for the Nook Color are increasing at a great pace.  My guess is they will end up being fairly comparable after several months.

Amazon does have the benefit of easily watching movies and downloading and listening to music.  I haven’t experimented with the Cloud aspect of the Kindle Fire – but it might make up for the lack of storage expansion.

Battery life was fairly comparable.  Some things drain the battery faster than others.  Of course, I almost always have my charging cables along so I never have a “power emergency” to deal with.

If you have not had either a Kindle or a Nook device before – try them out in a store and do some research.  If you do already have another Kindle or Nook device – you will probably want to stay in the same family in order to be able to use your purchases across devices.

 

 

Kindle App Store vs Nook App Store (December 2010)

There’s some very interesting news from the Nook Developer forum.

  1. B&N is going to send out a 1.2 OS update for Nook Color in Q1, 2011, with Flash/AIR support and email.
  2. Additionally, there will be apps from 25+ leading application developers and publishers. More details at this thread.
  3. On another thread B&N mentions that the Nook App Store will launch in Q1 of 2011. It is still working on integrating the app platform into the OS, and on enabling a ‘Developer Mode’ so that developers can test Nook Apps on the Nook Color.

That’s faster progress than you’d imagine.

Where is the Kindle App Store at?

Kindle App Store has 4 free Kindle Apps, and 27 or so paid Kindle Apps.

Assuming it adds 25 paid apps in January 2011, 40 paid apps in February 2011, and 50 paid apps in March 2011, it might end up at 142 paid apps by the end of Q1, 2011.

That would mean that the Nook App Store would have to deliver 50 to 100 apps by the end of Q1, 2011 to offer a compelling alternative.

Kindle App Store vs Nook App Store

Kindle has the clear lead. However, it should be worrying to Amazon that B&N has 25+ launch partners, and that developers can so easily port over Android Apps.

From how B&N is describing the porting process, it seems like a 1-week thing. That opens up the possibility that thousands of Android apps get ported over to the B&N Nook App Store. At that point, there’s no way Kindle App Store could compete on quantity of apps.

It would probably have to go with a ‘we have quality apps, and we have killer apps’ approach.

Kindle Apps vs Nook Apps

The recent announcement by B&N that there will be a Nook Color and that there will be a Nook Developer program to support it brings up some very interesting possibilities.

What do we know about Nook Apps?

We know that –

  1. Nook Apps will be based on Android with a few tweaks to work on Nook Color.
  2. Nook Apps will only work on Nook Color to begin with. So the install based will only be Nook Color owners.
  3. B&N has said it’ll expand the program to Nook 1 but has not given any dates.
  4. Android App developers should be able to port over their apps to Nook easily.
  5. Apps will start coming out early 2011.

Which brings us to an interesting question.

Kindle Apps vs Nook Apps – Who will win?

Well, Kindle Apps have some big advantages –

  1. Kindle App Store is already open with 4 paid apps and 3 free apps. 
  2. Developers have been working on Kindle Apps since start of 2010.
  3. There is a much bigger install base of Kindles.
  4. Kindle Apps work on Kindle 2, Kindle 3, and Kindle DX. That’s much better than Nook Apps which for now work only on Nook Color.
  5. Big name developers like Electronic Arts have already released apps.  

Nook Apps have some big advantages of their own –

  1. Color and Video.
  2. No speed problems so animation will be possible.
  3. A touchscreen for more interesting interaction options.
  4. Nook Color is based on Android so lots and lots of Android Apps could be ported over.
  5. B&N seems to be letting absolutely anyone join while Amazon has a limited Beta.

It’s quite likely that in its rush to catch up to Amazon B&N will make the review process very lenient and that would give it a big advantage in terms of quantity although average quality would go down.

Kindle Apps vs Nook Apps is going to be very interesting and it’s not out of the question that by mid to end 2011 the device with the better apps is selling more.

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