Barnes & Noble explores spinning off Nook business
Amid record digital sales and floundering physical sales, Barnes & Noble announced today that it plans to explore spinning off its Nook and e-book business.
Barnes & Noble is in the precarious position of having its losing physical bookstore business dragging down its growing e-reader/tablet and e-book business. Because of that setup, the company’s financial picture is ugly. The company just cut its sales forecast for fiscal 2012, which ends April 30, to between $7 … Continue Reading
RIM drops most-expensive BlackBerry PlayBook models to $299
Research in Motion appears to be celebrating the new year with an extraordinary price drop on its struggling BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, with all models now ringing in at $299.
RIM had already cut the price of its 16GB PlayBook model to $199 during the holiday season, but now it is taking the cost cutting further by making its more-expensive 32GB and 64GB models $299. The 16GB model is also listed at $299, but with all … Continue Reading
Zynga launches Words With Friends on the Nook e-book reader
Zynga launched its first game for the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader today, Words With Friends.
The wildly popular Scrabble clone will debut as an app for the Nook tablet today. The move is one more attempt by Zynga to reach non-gamers on non-traditional gaming devices. Zynga wants to expand the mass market for games and the Nook is one more platform for that.
Zynga is dependent on Facebook for more than 94 percent … Continue Reading
Holiday Gift Guide: Our favorite gadgets under $200
If you’re reading this blog, chances are you are the type of person who thinks a gadget can make for a mind-blowing gift.
Here’s a handy compendium for blowing minds on the (relatively) cheap. These gifts range in price from a $30 pair of hi-fi headphones to a $200 tablet, and they’ll make the nerd on your list smile. Or scream and jump around like that one House of Pain song never went out of … Continue Reading
Kindle Fire ships over 3M units, may already be no. 2 tablet after iPad
Amazon’s ultra-cheap Kindle Fire has already shipped between 3 and 4 million units. Combined with news of excellent Black Friday sales last week, the Fire may already be the number two tablet after the Apple iPad.
As far back as August, analysts have predicted that a less expensive, Amazon-made alternative to the iPad could sell up to 5 million units before the end of the year. Amazon appears to be making those predictions a reality … Continue Reading
VBWeekly: Everything you need to know about Black Friday (video)
It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and the VentureBeat offices are deserted. Where is everyone? Out shopping for insane Black Friday deals, apparently.
VentureBeat chief technical officer and resident videographer Christopher Peri spends some quality time with his camera, talking about what’s going on with holiday shopping this year. So far, online shopping is up 14 percent over the same period last year, which is a great trend.
Chris also talks about the top 10 Black … Continue Reading
Nook Simple Touch to match Kindle’s $79 price tag on Black Friday
Barnes & Noble will release a limited edition Nook Simple Touch e-reader with a white border for a bargain-bin price of $79 on Black Friday, the company announced today.
The most basic Amazon Kindle now retails for $79, no matter what day of the week is. However, the Nook Simple Touch has several clear advantages, as the basic Kindle does not have a touch screen and features some advertising.
For Black Friday, Barnes & Noble … Continue Reading
Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet follows Kindle Fire with early release today
Barnes & Noble has released its new $249 Nook Tablet today, following Amazon’s lead by unleashing its e-reader/tablet hybrid on the market a day early.
“Nook Tablet is the best wireless reading and entertainment tablet in the 7-inch class, and the customer response has been even greater than anticipated,” said Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch, in a statement. “At these super-low prices, Nook Tablet, Nook Color and the $99 Nook Simple Touch represent the … Continue Reading
U.S. authors: Kindle Lending Library is breach of contract
U.S. authors are not pleased with Amazon’s recently announced Kindle Lending Library and are claiming the powerful online retailer is “boldly breaching its contracts” with numerous publishers.
Amazon’s new Kindle Lending Library allows Kindle owners who subscribe to the premium Amazon Prime service to borrow one e-book a month for free. With more than 5,000 books to choose from, including big-name titles like Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” trilogy, Amazon is giving potential e-book buyers … Continue Reading
Kobo announces $99 e-reader with ads, taking on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
There’s yet another $99 touch e-reader joining the fray this holiday shopping season. Kobo has announced its $99 Kobo Touch with Offers, which is the same device as a regular $130 Kobo Touch, but the screen will display ads when it is in sleep mode or turned off, as well as in what the company mysteriously refers to as “discreet places.”
The 6-inch e-reader will be a direct competitor to Amazon’s Kindle Touch with Special … Continue Reading
Loss leader alert: $79 Amazon Kindle costs $84 to build
Amazon’s new jaw-droppingly priced $79 Kindle actually costs $84.25 to manufacture, yet another sign that Amazon cares more about profiting on the content it sells rather than hardware.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has made the bet that getting low-cost hardware into hands of consumers will pay off immensely when they buy more digital content to make up for hardware losses. That’s the exact opposite approach of Apple, which makes its money on hardware sales and … Continue Reading
Print is dying: E-readers start slaughtering print book sales (infographic)
If you believe in karma, it should come as no surprise that e-readers are slowly killing off print books — perhaps in retaliation for all those trees murdered over the years.
With the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet just days away, it’s cleear that e-readers are becoming must-have devices. E-reader and tablets have seen massive growth in adoption in the past year. A recent Pew Internet … Continue Reading
Kindle Fire will launch with apps for Netflix, Facebook, Angry Birds and more
Amazon’s ridiculously hyped Kindle Fire tablet will launch next week with apps from Netflix, Facebook, Rovio, Electronic Arts, PopCap and more, with several thousand apps available in total, the company announced.
The Kindle Fire, like the Nook Color and some other Android-based tablets, doesn’t have access to the Android Marketplace, so it must provide a separate channel for apps. Thankfully, Amazon already has its own Amazon Appstore for Android, which has been accumulating apps since … Continue Reading
Barnes & Noble cries foul on Microsoft for Android patent trolling
Barnes & Noble has appealed to U.S. regulators to put a stop to Microsoft’s collection of patent royalties for Android devices.
“Microsoft is embarking on a campaign of asserting trivial and outmoded patents against manufacturers of Android devices,” wrote Barnes & Noble, maker of the Android-running Nook line, in an letter to the U.S. Justice Department’s chief counsel for competition policy.
In March, Microsoft sued Barnes & Nobel for infringing on five patents related to … Continue Reading
Dylan’s Desk: Welcome to the age of integration
Apple understands it. Amazon understands it.
But nearly every other gadget manufacturer is missing the point: It’s not about the specs any more. It’s about the ability of devices to deliver a seamless, integrated, easy-to-use experience that combines plenty of desirable content and useful services, with a minimum of hassle.
Call it “vertical integration” or whatever you want, it’s the strategy employed by successful companies like Apple, Amazon, Nike and Microsoft to make some of … Continue Reading
E-reader wars: How the Nook Tablet compares to the Kindle Fire
In a remarkably speedy attempt at one-upmanship, Barnes & Noble announced its new Nook Tablet today, a direct competitor to Amazon’s similar Kindle Fire.
They have a lot in common. Both are 7-inch, sub-$300 Android tablets, and both are shipping in time for the holiday shopping season — the Kindle Fire on Nov 18 and the Nook Tablet on Nov 15. And both could face a bit of competition from the Kobo Vox e-reader, the … Continue Reading
Hands-on with the Nook Tablet, and a chat with B&N’s Nook CTO (video)
Let me make it clear up front: The Nook Tablet looks and feels exactly like last year’s Nook Color. But Barnes & Noble is hoping that its beefed up hardware will make it a worthy contender against Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire tablet.
At Barnes & Noble’s launch event for the tablet in New York City today, I was able to get a bit of hands-on time with the Nook Tablet. I also chatted with the … Continue Reading
B&N revamps $99 Nook Simple Touch with better E-Ink screen, drops Nook Color to $199
Alongside Barnes & Noble’s announcement today of its new $249 Nook Tablet, it has also revealed that it’s upgraded its Nook Simple Touch e-reader with faster rendering software and a new E-Ink screen while also dropping the price to an eye-catching $99. It has also lowered the price of its popular Nook Color to $199.
All of Barnes & Noble’s e-reader announcements today are direct responses to Amazon’s latest refreshes of the Kindle line, including … Continue Reading
Barnes & Noble’s $249 Nook Tablet to challenge Amazon’s Kindle Fire
Barnes & Noble is taking on Amazon and its Kindle Fire tablet by expanding its lineup of Nook e-readers to include a lighter, faster, 7-inch color touchscreen device called the Nook Tablet, according to documents obtained by Engadget.
The Nook Tablet, which will retail for $249, closely resembles the Nook Color but has beefed-up specifications. It comes with a dual core processor, 16 GB of storage — twice that of both the Nook Color and … Continue Reading
Kobo’s new $200 Vox tablet takes on the Kindle Fire & Nook Color
Kobo today launched Vox, a new, priced-to-sell Android tablet. Or is it an e-reader? Does anyone know the difference these days?
Vox is a color, 7-inch touchscreen, Android-running gadget that features music, video and social widgets and apps. It has a web browser, an email client, and even an app store stocked with more than 15,000 free Android applications.
The product directly competes with the much-hyped Amazon Kindle Fire, a similar device set to start … Continue Reading
