The Nook is Dead, Right?

Kindle sales are booming. The iPad is magical, everybody wants one. That means Barnes & Noble and their Nook are dead, right?

Not so fast, says Wired magazine. Nook sales are up, and B&N still sells more hardbacks and paperbacks than anybody else. They have the advantage of being on street corners everywhere. You can’t walk into an Amazon store, pick up the Kindle, and see how it works. You don’t have clerks who can push the device. B&N has all of this.

From the article:

“Barnes & Noble has consistently gone for a hybrid strategy: providing touch and text, tightly integrating e-sales with its existing stores while also selling the Nook at Best Buy, letting its books be read on the Nook as well as other platforms. B&N’s apps for PC and Mac are arguably best-in-class (bonus points, too, for getting its Mac app out way before Amazon’s). The company is doubling down on (and rebranding) its apps for mobile devices. And it’s drawing on a solid base of neighborhood customer/members and university bookstores. Even as Amazon cuts its prices and diversifies its models to match the Nook, it can’t match Barnes & Noble’s deep reach into the real world.”