back to article Barnes & Noble: Swallow a Samsung Nook tablet, please ... pretty please

The lovechild of bookseller Barnes & Noble and electronics giant Samsung – the new Galaxy Tab 4 Nook tablet – is now on sale. The, surprise, surprise, Android-powered novelslab is a standard-issue 7in Galaxy Tab 4, running Barnes & Noble's e-reader software. The unit will be Wi-Fi only. The Sammy Nook, unveiled in June, is …

  1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    Why?

    Dedicated ebook reader = cheap, charge lasts months, can read in sunlight

    Phone = have one anyway, always with you, keep it charged, But small screen can't read in sunlight

    Tablet = already own one or buy $50 cheap slow 7" one. But poor battery, can't read in sunlight

    Dedicated ebook tablet = expensive, don't already own one, poor battery, don't always carry it, can't read in sunlight. Why am I buying this?

    1. Stanislaw
      FAIL

      Re: Why?

      Seems to me that B&N have misunderstood the problem entirely. The old tablets were fine, really - and the e-readers were excellent. Nope, the real problem is B&N's woeful attempt at an online store. To say it's clunky would be being rude to clunky things. It's slow, it's ugly, and when you finally give up and go to Google Books or the Kindle store you realise just how poor B&N's is by comparison. Finding things is difficult, and when you do stumble across what you were after, the "more like this" button usually tells you there's nothing more like this - even if you're looking at an Agatha Christie - and no attempt is made to offer things you might be interested in based on your purchase or viewing history. Reviews are sometimes from users, sometimes culled from the press, often not there at all. My wishlist does not sync from my HD+ to my Simple Touch, and is usually completely unavailable anyway. I could go on. And on. In short, B&N's online store appears to utterly miss the point of being online.

      Who knows? Maybe if they offered a better shopping experience, they might sell more hardware to shop/read with. It's a shame because we could do with a bit more competition in this area, methinks.

      1. GBE

        Re: Why?

        When I bought my first e-book, I had to decide: B&N or Amazon.

        Didn't have a smart-phone or a tablet. Didn't want to buy a dedicated e-reader yet. Didn't have a Windows or MacOS computer. With the Amazon e-book, I could read it on my Linux desktop and laptop. With the B&N e-book: nope.

        Not much of a choice after all. I've since bought a number of e-books from Amazon and a Kindle paperwhite (which I use mostly with library books and things like PDFs of owners manuals for various things). If B&N had provided a way for Linux users to read their e-books, I probably would have leaned towards B&N just for the sake of keeping some competition alive -- but that ship has sunk.

        1. e^iπ+1=0

          Re: Why?

          "Re: Why?

          When I bought my first e-book, I had to decide: B&N or Amazon."

          When I bought my first (non e-) book, I had to decide:

          1) What fucking book I wanted to buy.

          2) Where's the nearest bookshop (with stock).

          In those days the book market was rigged; the book cost the same everywhere.

          Nowadays the eBook market is rigged; once you've chosen your eReader you may have extremely limited choices as to where to source the book; if the book is priced differently for another platform: tough.

      2. Gray
        Facepalm

        Re: Why?

        "Who knows? Maybe if they offered a better shopping experience, they might sell more hardware to shop/read with."

        I couldn't agree more! And the B&N site search function is totally hopeless! Comparing the B&N site to Amazon's is like comparing a Trabant ( regarded with derisive affection as a symbol of the extinct former East Germany -- Wikipedia ) to a Mercedes. Yeh, you (may) eventually get somewhere, but afterward you'll push the Trabant off a cliff lest you ever be tempted to use it again.

        I s'pose the B&N management decisions could be compared to the best/worst of the Dilbert comic strip. I bought a Nook a few years ago; the only thing going for it was the ePub and other open formats it allows, as compared to the proprietary Kindle lockdown approach. That is perhaps the one and only intelligent decision B&N made. Nothing makes up for the miserable experience of shopping B&N online ebooks, and then after enduring their clumsy website, discovering that their book costs more!

        1. Rob

          Re: Why?

          A +1 just because of the mention of a beast of a classic like the Trabant, gotta love communist engineering.

          1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            Re: Why?

            > gotta love communist engineering.

            How are we getting into space these days?

  2. LordWilmore

    We've had two Nook HD+'s's's in our house for over a year and I have to say they're far superior to the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire in terms of, well, everything. IMHO of course.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Similar here. I like my Nook HD+ tablet. Can't say I've ever read a book on it though. It's too heavy and the battery doesn't last long enough.

      We also have a couple of Kindle e-ink e-book readers for reading.

    2. MyffyW Silver badge

      Have a Nook HD+ bought as general purpose android slab. Beats the Kindle Fire insofar as it has access to Google Play. Does the job. When it came to wanting to read on it my other half instinctively installed the Kindle reader.

  3. Tom Chiverton 1

    wtf

    " only then to see readers pass on dedicated ebook gadgets "

    I rather enjoy not having to charge my Kobo for weeks and weeks at a time.

    Vs. my tablet which always seems to be flat.

    Guess which one goes on holiday with me !

    1. Mike Taylor

      Re: wtf

      Love our thirty quid kibos. Spend a lot on books too. House someone is making money on it. But a tablet our phone for treating books? No, ta.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: wtf

        In the words of Alan Partridge: Sorry, that was just noise.

  4. Matt Black

    Bundled with, Worth, Free, ...

    At least this comes 'bundled with books, magazines and video worth more $200' rather than 'with FREE $200'. But 'worth'? Only if you could persuade folk to purchase all those items at resale price.

  5. James 51

    I've said it before and I have no doubt I'll have cause to say it again. When I go on holiday my tablet needs charged when I get to the hotel. My e-reader needs charged when I get back home. I do no reading on the tablet. It is poorer in every single regard except it has colour.

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Agreeing with everyone else

      I'm the odd one out, though: I've bought only one book for the Kobo just to see how it worked. The rest of my stuff is scans (or online trawls) of paper books I already own - and ePub was a critical reason for selecting the Kobo.

      If I had a tablet already, why would I - assuming I wanted to read books on it - simply not load a Kobo or Aldiko reader application? Why on earth would I go out and buy a device allegedly sold as a reader with all the disadvantages of a tablet and none of the advantages of e-ink?

      (apropos of which - the kobo is now being modified as a GPS navigational device for paragliders and hang gliders... - for exactly the same reason it works as a reader: long battery life and highly visible in daylight.)

      1. Intractable Potsherd

        Re: Agreeing with everyone else @ Neil Barnes

        My reasoning was the same when I finally went for an e-book reader. I wanted something that would use the maximum number of formats, especially epub from sources other than the book-sellers, so anything by B&N, Amazon etc was out. I went for a JetBook - great until it broke my fall down a flight of stairs two years ago. A replacement JetBook was a bit expensive, so a Kobo Touch was acquired from eBay. Apart from the regular "guess what functionality the latest update is going to inexplicably alter" amusement, it is a brilliant piece of kit that just keeps going, and battery life is excellent - at least a week at a time. Every now and again I think that a Kobo Glo might be worth acquiring for the odd occasion a backlight would be useful (wanting to read in bed after Mrs IP has gone to sleep, mainly), but I doubt it will happen this side of the Touch failing somehow. Whatever, it will be e-ink that replaces it - I cannot understand why someone would use a LED screen regularly to read.

  6. Alan Denman

    An untaxing offering

    Obviously B & N needed to offer something to the public that does not tax away all its profits.

    This does the trick for those who read, blog and Facebook gossip. People want an open marketplace, one that B & N failed at owning. There is now really only one 'owning everything' sole trader left stuck in that dark closet.

  7. Daniel Bower

    eInk for text - always

    I can only agree with others - for pure text based reading the Kindle Paperwhite (other e-readers are available) is very very close to reading text printed on paper.

    A tablet just is not. Sure for media rich content a tablet is useful but for plain text give me eInk any day. My Kindle is one of the few things that if it broke I would go straight out and buy another one.

  8. spamspamspam

    Nook Simple Touch is great: all the benefits of an e-ink screen mentioned above, cost me about £20, & when rooted runs the Kindle app perfectly, as well as Gmail & Calendar very usably & Opera if you're desperate :-)

  9. 2460 Something
    Unhappy

    eink all the way!

    Cannot see the point in having a tablet as an ebook reader. The eink screens are far superior for extended reading. All of my ebooks are already in epub format and I just copy them across to a microSD card for use in the nook. Sad shame they wont be producing another dedicated ebook reader. Hopefully one will surface at some point in the future when my current one needs replacing.

  10. Thunderbird 2

    Not one of the ebooks on my "Nook Simple Touch /w Glowlight" came from the B&N Store, well technically they aren't on it, they are on the good old plugin SD-Card.

    Best thing about the Nook was it's super cheap price (reduced to £30-40 this time last year)

    Worst thing, its swipe to wake up is attrocious, takes dozens of attempts.

    After the initial enthusiasm of having that touchy feely "touch" waned I went back to my old reliable Aluretek., 5 years now and still going strong. Buy ebooks from anywhere, using desktop pc, use good Calibre to maintain my library and to strip off the DRM to let me read them on any device.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    nook is good

    is? was. Mine developed bleeding (backlight version) very soon, but I couldn't be bothered to return it (probably I would have got a refund, as they stopped making them then). So it bleeds, shrug, I read. Another good idea killed off as it didn't create enough "revenue streams" as they hoped. Hence the current tablet shift. I don't think they'll get far though, not with the flood of cheaper, much cheaper devices.

    And people who've had an e-ink device will replace it with an e-ink device. If no nook, then something else.

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