Will the Nook Wind Up Hurting Barnes & Noble?
When the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader was announced last week, I wrote about the company's strategy to beat out Amazon's Kindle by making B&N e-books available on many different devices, giving customers more places to buy and read their books. It only took a couple of days before Amazon followed suit and announced it too was making a Kindle app for PCs. Versions for Mac and BlackBerry are supposedly in the works.
Choice is good. But Marion Maneker over at The Big Money argues
that while the Kindle helps Amazon's business, if the Nook turns out to
be a big hit it could wind up hurting Barnes & Noble. As book
prices fall due to heavy discounting, it is becoming harder for the
bookseller to support its expensive stores and many employees. The Nook
may make the problem worse by robbing sales from the company's physical
bookstores while setting an expectation among its customers for cheaper
books.
Maneker writes:
"Amazon has established the idea of $9.99 e-books, especially for best-sellers ... On the most heavily trafficked titles, BN.com will have to spend money to keep up the $9.99 price point. But Amazon has mountains of cash from its other businesses to support this; B&N does not. The physical stores don’t generate enough profit for that. Meanwhile, those stores are getting beat up by Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon, as they establish a $9 price for the biggest best-selling titles."
It will be interesting to see how B&N tries to get around this. Does it shutter many of its physical stores and move more toward becoming an online and e-book seller? Or does it find a way to use its physical bookstores to offer customers an "experience" that online stores can't?
There's a lot more in Maneker's piece--well worth reading the whole thing.Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Weston Kosova was promoted to senior editor in Newsweek's Washington bureau in December 1999. He joined the bureau as a correspondent in September 1995 and reports and writes on a wide-range of topics, from national affairs to terrorism to politics.
Kosova is also responsible for developing in-depth reporting projects that team him with correspondents in Washington and around the country and for creative planning with reporters and editors based at New York headquarters.
Kosova came to Newsweek from The New Republic, where he was managing editor and then a senior editor covering Congress. Previously he was an associate editor with Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly.
Kosova graduated in 1989 from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, with a B.A. in political science.
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