Microsoft May Acquire Nook Tablet Business From Barnes and Noble 157
whoever57 writes "According to a report in Techcrunch, Microsoft is considering buying out the remaining shares in Nook Media. Microsoft already owns 17% of Nook Media. Documents reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue selling tablets and transition to a model under which media is distributed through partners."
(Also at SlashCloud.)
Video game consoles, for counterexample (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Next Up (Score:4, Interesting)
We have two companies admitting failure here, B&N and MSFT.
It's too bad about the Nook, they are nice devices. Nook should have won over Kindle, but B&N didnt have the foresight years ago to get into the everything business the way Amazon did, so they were always going to be muscled out of the market.
Microsoft on the other hand will probably just try to make money off Nook's patent portfolio, given they have failed with their "Surface" (which, near as I can tell, is some kind of break-dancing tutor device.)
Re:Next Up (Score:2, Interesting)
Our pop, impatient "gotta have it now" while at the same time "I'll wait for the movie because reading is too time consuming" mentality is destroying not just our own brain cells, but reducung the capacity and potention of our children.
I'm too tired to think about this, but I'm pretty sure it's tragic.
Re:Next Up (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that it'll be a loss for consumers if the Nook disappears. However...
I've owned (or currently own) three Kindles, one Nook (the glow light version), and the new Kobo that got slashvertised here a few weeks ago. As I've posted before, Amazon simply has the best platform of the three (I haven't tried others). It's ridiculously easy to sideload books wirelessly, without jailbreaking, to all of your Kindles at once. More importantly, Kindle will sync the location of sideloaded books. Third-party publishers, such as Baen, already offer MOBI files, so you don't even need to use Calibre.
The only other eBook vendor I know of that syncs sideloaded stuff is Apple, and they don't have a dedicated eReader, and sideloading is a little bit trickier than the Kindle. I haven't checked out Google; how are they in this arena?
I've also found Amazon to be the cheapest, at least for books I actually want to read. Two books on my shortlist, A Fire Upon the Deep and The Last Colony, are both $2 more on the Kobo store. A couple dollars here and there add up. (My solution right now is to buy on Amazon and convert it for the Kobo.)
What makes it all so frustrating is that Amazon has the worst hardware of the three. It isn't that it's bad, it's that it's very utilitarian. The Nook has the best-feeling reader, while the Kobo has the best software (their text options are downright great), screen, and backlight.