The promo video for the new Barnes & Noble e-book reader, which begins with the single dirtiest sentence in all product video history.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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30 comments:
Oh, Rogers! You make me giggle like a 12 year old. I had the mental image of her pointing at the "nook" with a group of children around her. I feel dirty now. Thank you.
I love nook e-reader.
*SNERK* Oh, that is a very unfortunate product name.
Okay, I do feel a little dirty about having looked so closely at her nook... but that looks pretty awesome. Who's having Kindle buyer's regret? That's me. Color touch screen... Lend e-books... I want to go to there! Come on Amazon. Step it up.
And they still missed in my opinion.
One of these days one of the big publishers or big book stores is going to take Gillette's rule to heart, and when they do they'll mop the floor.
Give the razor, sell the blade. Give the reader, sell the book. $250 is too much for most people.
"Nook" is the new "cooch"... or so I hear.
I'm already a fan of Kate's nook.
It leaves me feeling all warm and fuzzy.
"Hi, I'm Kate and this is my Nook".
Ah, the Joe Camel Phallus face of E-Book reading. Well played, gentleman. Well played.
Look at the sloooooow response time on that page turn.
Not only did I snicker like Beavis and Butthead, but I simultaneously got a Kate crush.
I am forever your man, ser. Well called, well called, indeed. :D
Must have been the same marketing team that came up with Dunkin Donuts' Turtle Nut Iced Latte.
Some people just have minds that are too clean.
@kirkspencer --
Cost of making an ebook reader is around $200. Amazon is selling ebooks at ten bucks a pop; B&N doesn't have any room to move that price higher or people won't buy from B&N. At the very most, that leaves a buck or so of profit for B&N.
So giving away the reader means you need to sell someone 100 to 200 books before you recoup the purchase price of the reader, except that you're also subsidizing the cost of the wireless network, so it's really somewhat higher than that. But let's pretend it's not.
The average American reads under 10 books per year. So if we sell the reader for $100, it'll take ten years to make back that loss on book sales. That doesn't sound like a very good marketing plan.
The razor and blades model is not universally applicable. It works when people have to buy a lot of the commodity item, and when the single-sale item is relatively cheap to produce. Neither of those things are true for ebooks.
I think this will come down to how the battery holds up, because that color touch screen doesn't recharge itself.
"Nappy dugout." Why didn't they just call it that?
Amid all the hoopla from B & N and the others (the Kindle, the Que, Sony's), Google just announced that it will be selling E-Books that can be read in any browser such as can be put on smart phones, game players, netbooks, and, of course PCs. See my article on it with links at The Last Reveal: http://thelastreveal.blogspot.com/.
Oh God. Her name is my name.
I think I'm being given a Kindle for my birthday though. No Nook (!) for me, probably.
I wonder if I could link her Nook to my Wii.
"I wonder if I could link her Nook to my Wii."
Mr. Underwood. Feel free to take an internet out of petty cash.
Can I just say, did no one say that new product name out loud? "NookE" reader? Seriously? "whatcha reading? "nookie!" no, not what are you reading about, what are you reading on? That's what I said! I'm reading my Nook-E." meh!
I'm waiting for the "nook" to go on sale in England. We will seriously be incapable of not sniggering. Or wondering about whether Kate's cranny has the same features as her nook.
Oh just heard. It's going to be called the Twat here. Well that disarms that one.
I see a huge celebrity campaign:
Cast of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES or GOSSIP GIRL saying things like...
"I was just going over my nook while I had my morning coffee..."
"I'm always lending things from my nook..."
"My nook always gets a signal..."
"I fill my nook with all sorts of things..."
It's either incredibly retarded or incredibly smart.
I haven't been able to decide if the product naming is very very clever or very very stupid. I'm giggling hysterically at the comments here, though.
(For some reason, I'm reminded of the apocryphal story of the detergent that was supposed to be named "Dreck.")
I don't know that I have any Kindle buyers regret. It looks to me like this does the same things my Kindle does except for the touch screen taking the place of the keyboard. ::shrug::
I suspect I'd always be bumping the touch screen with my fingers, just like I bump the side keys of the Kindle, so I don't know if that's really something I miss.
I love my Kindle :)
I'd like to bury my nose in her nook...And how's this for bizarre coincidence, my verification word is NOSEQUAT!
I've tried her Nook. It has a difficult interface. :X
Yeah, no Kindle buyer's remorse here. Well, I did buy mine in March, so I'm not liking how much I paid for mine versus how much the international version of the Kindle is now, but such is life. Another think I don't like is that, well, I don't think it has a web browser, and that's half or a quarter of the utility with the Kindle for me, since it allows me to check my e-mail, the bus schedules, and movie times without having to pay for internet. Plus, that color screen looks like it'll eat batteries for a light snack.
Bryant,
Actually I think it does apply, but it requires delving into some history.
Gillette didn't arbitrarily create his philosophy. He took advantage of a production technique that slashed the cost of his blades: mass production stamped blades. He also did not give away a competitor to the Henckel Rapide; no brass, no ivory, just inexpensive metals. (Well, he did sell more expensive razors, but they weren't given away either.)
The majority of costs of books lie with dealing with the printed material - the presses, the binding, shipping, and housing. There is no need to match cuts in expense with cuts in price; at least not at first.
The second thing is that the reader is too expensive. It's a henckel rapide, not a gillette safety. The 'inkless paper' technology of which Kindle, Sony and now B&N brag is (for technology) fairly mature tech. Reduce the bells and whistles to a minimum, cut to a screen the size of the first Kindle, and you can probably drive the cost way down. (Comparative example - so-called disposable cell phones.)
Run a reader that costs ~$50 to produce, sell e-books that cost $5 for $10, and you have quite a margin with which you can play.
However cool these kind of devices may be at reading books, I don't want to have to cart around yet-another-thing-in-my-pants-pocket (or, in the case of the Kindle and Nook, in-my-cargo-pants-pocket). I have to agree with the tech commentator Alex Lindsay: I don't want a unitasker. My iPhone is not as great a web browser as my laptop, and it doesn't play games as well as my desktop, and its not as good a GPS as a dedicated unit, but it does all those functions and many more "good enough", certainly "good enough" to let me avoid having to lug around 10 more pounds of electronics wherever I go.
The iPhone and its like may have too small a screen to be a really good reader, but I don't see a dedicated device as a good option -- a better approach would be a truly multifunction device that is the size of the Nook or Kindle, in other words, a tablet-sized Android or iPhone-based device that lets you read books, but also read your email and browse the web and play games and watch video and make calls and...
Actually, I think it's the exact opposite. Sell the razor, give the blade. I would be a hell of a lot more likely to buy a $250 ebook reader if ebooks were cheaper. To give a random example: Stephen King's latest book, "Just After Sunset", is ten dollars as hardcopy and eight as an ebook. (Prices from Amazon.com.)
The cost to produce the physical copy of that book is about six dollars for a hardcopy...and about zero for an ebook. In other words, they're making (about, roughly, ish) four extra dollars per copy they sell as an ebook.
Readers aren't dumb. We know they could drop the price of every freaking ebook in existence by about three bucks and still make money hand over fist. If they did that, the economic advantages of ebooks over hardcopy would drive people to the medium. As it is, publishers' greed is keeping ebooks from taking off.
(I sell my ebooks for five bucks, seven less than my print copies, and I still feel guilty.)
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