DailyTech - Barnes and Noble Nook Sold Out Until 2010

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Gadgets Barnes and Noble Nook Sold Out Until 2010
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - November 23, 2009 11:14 AM

8 comment(s) - last by freezervv.. on Nov 24 at 1:59 PM

Amazon will benefit from lack of Nook eReaders for Christmas

Some of the hottest gadgets that will be offered this holiday season are eReaders like the offerings from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Sony. The newest of the eReaders to be offered in time for the holiday season is the Barnes & Noble Nook. The Nook is different from the other eReaders on the market in that it offers the typical e-Ink display for reading books and has a color touchscreen underneath for navigating the Barnes & Noble electronic book store.

Barnes & Noble has announced that the supplies of the Nook available for delivery before Christmas have been depleted and as of last Friday, anyone who orders will get a certificate to put under the tree that says the Nook will be delivered in January. Reuters reports that Sony has also announced it has run out of supplies of its new reader as well.

The big winner here will be Amazon and its popular Kindle line of eReaders. Amazon had supply issues last year, but this year the ecommerce giant reportedly has plenty of stock of its readers. The unavailability of the Nook and Sony readers will have many consumers buying the Kindle since it will be available.

Analyst Sarah Rotman Epps from Forrester said, "Amazon can reap the benefit of Sony and Barnes & Noble's failures here. Consumers looking for a wireless e-reader before the holidays now just have one main alternative -- the Kindle."

The popularity of the Nook does have a gray cloud hanging over the device though with a suit pending from a firm called Alex Design. Spring showed its own eReader to Barnes & Noble over a year ago according to the firm in an effort to forge a distributing agreement. Barnes & Noble allegedly misused the advanced information about the Alex eReader and incorporated some of the design into the Nook.

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Wait, what?

By freezervv on 11/23/2009 3:18:43 PM , Rating: 2

Explain to me in what world selling out (for one month) of a product you just launched is "failure"?

RE: Wait, what?

By jdietz on 11/23/2009 3:26:55 PM , Rating: 1

The economy happens when people offer things for sale and other people buy them. It isn't happening in this case due to lack of supply. Therefore, it's a failure.

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RE: Wait, what?

By hadifa on 11/23/2009 5:12:39 PM , Rating: 4

quote:
Explain to me in what world selling out (for one month) of a product you just launched is "failure"?

In our world, during Christmas shopping frenzy, when the competition has similar product to sell and customers are not going to shell out again later if they get one now.

This is not bread or cheese that people might buy every week. If they were first to market and there were no competition, then some shortage could even fuel the demand, but this seems to be a colossal failure.

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RE: Wait, what?

By kkwst2 on 11/24/2009 8:11:33 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah, it's amazing to me there are that many people out there willing to pay this much for an e-book reader at this point. I still consider e-book readers a fairly niche item, but the sales numbers are starting to say otherwise.

I haven't kept up with it, but it seems that the e-book publishing is at least more open than, say, the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray war was. If I want to buy the latest Tom Clancy or Dean Koontz, I can do it just as easily at Amazon or B&N, right? Are there any exclusive deals that affect whether you go with one or the other? Amazon certainly has the jump, but if there aren't major barriers to entry then there still should be room for other products if they're well done. How many has Amazon sold, a million or two? We've probably got at least twice that many readers left in the US alone, right?

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RE: Wait, what?

By freezervv on 11/24/2009 1:59:36 PM , Rating: 2

We'll see. I honestly think this is going to be a case of the competition not having a similar product.

From everything I've seen, the Nook looks more likely to go the iPod/DS/Wii/iPhone route than the 'an ebook reader' one.

I used to think goods were interchangeable, but then I realized Apple would be out of business if that were the case. ;)

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No Nook-e

By nafhan on 11/23/2009 12:28:00 PM , Rating: 5

Sad, sad, sad. No Nook-e for Christmas.

RE: No Nook-e

By mooncancook on 11/23/2009 2:39:57 PM , Rating: 2

Try Tom Nook's store. Be prepared for some serious markup though.

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Need picture

By Trisped on 11/24/2009 8:48:09 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
the typical e-Ink display for reading books and has a color touchscreen underneath

When I read the quote I thought the screen was behind the eInk display. I had to click the link to the previous article to see the picture before I realized that it was just further down on the device.