Books nowhere / books somewhere

Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader* has a lot of nice things going for it. But I’m really intrigued by a par­tic­u­lar design/software/sales choice that’s got­ten less atten­tion than native PDF sup­port or the color touch­screen or even the abil­ity to “lend” e-books to friends. 

Barnes & Noble has fig­ured out a way to tie the expe­ri­ence of using the e-reader to the expe­ri­ence of shop­ping in one of their brick-and-mortar stores. In prin­ci­ple, this could allow B&N to use an elec­tronic mar­ket­place not to sub­sti­tute for retail shop­ping, but to aug­ment it (and vice versa). And I think this shows us an alter­nate way to think about elec­tronic read­ing than the deliv­ery model that most of us have taken for granted.

Here’s how this is sup­posed to work:

In any of the chain’s 1,300 stores, con­sumers can down­load books on the Wi-Fi net­work. Out­side the stores, con­sumers will access AT&T’s 3G net­work to down­load books…

In an inter­view, William Lynch, pres­i­dent of Barnes&Noble.com, said the com­pany would aggres­sively mar­ket the Nook within its bricks and mor­tar stores. The Nook also has soft­ware that will detect when a con­sumer walks into a store so that it can push out coupons and other pro­mo­tions like excerpts from forth­com­ing books or sug­ges­tions for new read­ing. While in stores, Nook own­ers will be able to read any e-book through stream­ing software.

The promise of the Kin­dle is that you can buy and read books any­where at all — that is, nowhere in par­tic­u­lar. The Ama­zon store has no loca­tion. You read the books on your screen, and they are tech­ni­cally stored on your device, but effec­tively, the books are like­wise nowhere. 

Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, is still com­mit­ted to the idea that books have PLACES, that they are most prop­erly browsed and bought and read in spe­cific loca­tions. They say: yes, you can use your Nook any­where — but the very best place to use it is in one of our stores. What’s more: as long as you’re in the store, you can read as much of as many books as you want. Just like if you were flip­ping the pages. That’s huge!

This choice may have been inevitable: B&N had to find some way to lever­age its retail chain, the only real advan­tage it has over play­ers like Ama­zon or even Sony. They also have cus­tomers who are accus­tomed to com­ing to their stores, flash­ing their dis­count cards, drink­ing cof­fee and eat­ing scones in their cafés. For Barnes and Noble, THIS is the nat­ural con­stituency for their e-readers — not the wan­der­ing dig­i­tal nomads who might buy a Kin­dle, might buy an iPhone, might buy a PS3, or might blow it all at Newegg, depend­ing on how long they stay online. And B&N can also part­ner with other busi­nesses — offer­ing its library to read­ers at Star­bucks (or some other cof­fee chain) or the CTA. Wher­ever books are read!

If this works — by which I mean, not only that the Nook sells well, but that cus­tomers actu­ally take their Nooks into stores to take advan­tage of these added fea­tures, and the wi-fi actu­ally works, and the coupons and ads aren’t out-and-out both­er­some, then we’ll have a new way of think­ing about the use of elec­tronic read­ers in all sorts of con­texts: libraries, muse­ums, ele­men­tary schools, civic cen­ters, col­lege cam­puses. The con­tent and its deliv­ery become not just user-aware, but location-aware. 

Above and beyond Nook’s com­pe­ti­tion with the Kin­dle as such, the fact that it actu­ally offers a com­pet­ing model for use opens things up quite a bit. Let’s see where this goes.

* I don’t like the term e-reader. The phrase I always WANT to use, which is jus­ti­fied nowhere, is read­ing machine. Is any­one with me?

18 Responses

Nav says:
October 26, 2009 at 8:52 pm
So wait, I’ll use my read­ing machine to read things on my read­ing machine? Am *I* a read­ing machine? ;) (Actu­ally, I’m with you — eBook is a bad name now that I think about it.)
I like this. This reminds me of that Alan Liu thing I block­quoted recently about the new metaphors for read­ing being about spaces and com­mu­ni­ties rather than the phys­i­cal bor­ders that delimit the start and end of texts. 
It’s cool the way this also becomes a kind of — dunno’ quite how to say this — but ‘a pro­jected, abstracted com­mu­nity’. When we speak about cof­fee shops as hubs of com­mu­nity, there’s a metaphor there, a kind of imag­ined thing radi­at­ing out of a cen­tre that draws peo­ple in. This sorta’ does some­thing cool with that — i.e. *some­thing* is radi­at­ing out and draw­ing peo­ple in, beck­on­ing them to gather around and share sto­ries and ideas. It’s wi-fi, so it’s ethe­real and inde­ci­pher­able until you slip into the space and become a part of it phys­i­cally — much like the abstract nature of com­mu­ni­ties as func­tions of the imag­i­na­tion. If it works, it’s another one of those funny inver­sions of people’s techno­pho­bia — the ‘dis­ap­pear­ance’ of the book will bring peo­ple together into community.
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Saheli says:
October 26, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I have a con­flicted rela­tion­ship with Barnes and Noble b/c it is the per­ceived enemy of inde­pen­dent book stores like Cody’s (RIP), Vroman’s, Tat­tered Cover, Mrs. Dalloway’s (newly expanded! So awe­some!), Diesel, Rakestraw, etc.. On the other hand, Ama­zon is their true enemy, and B&N pro­vides things like author read­ings and bib­lio­philic staff that Ama­zon will never pro­vide. They also *brought* book­stores and read­ing sub­urbs to the benighted sub­urbs I was exiled to in my youth, using that sense of place and the lux­u­ri­ous inspi­ra­tion of big shelves filled with books to ignite a read­ing cul­ture where I know it had been dor­mant if not dead. This seems like a way to lever­age those advan­tages. You can imag­ine sign­ings where you imme­di­ately have that book launched on your Nook, in pre­view mode, and as the author chooses dif­fer­ent pages to read from, your Nook imme­di­ately goes to that page so you can read along; if you choose to (instantly, no line to buy) pur­chase the book on your Nook, you can get a poster signed instead. Authors fre­quently men­tion other books as they dis­cuss their work–all of those books would be brought up to pre­view on your nook as well. You can imag­ine books that only exist in par­tic­u­lar stores—there are all kinds of gam­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties there. 
The killer advan­tage to me is the abil­ity to lend books, which also makes it a much more social thing. 
So yeah, I’m lean­ing towards being pos­i­tive about this.
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Peter says:
October 27, 2009 at 6:03 am
Given that Nook runs Android, can we assume it will be hacked fairly quickly even though B&N has no SDK plan for now? Does that mean sooner or later we’re going to see a “go to the B&N store and down­load any book you want per­ma­nently for free” app? Does the fact that you’re now break­ing your Terms of Use con­tract AND you’re stand­ing in their store add some kind of in-person danger/thrill fac­tor to what would oth­er­wise be stan­dard online piracy? Musings…
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Tim Carmody says:
October 27, 2009 at 6:35 am
Ooh, yes: shoplift­ing, right under their nose!
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Tim Carmody says:
October 27, 2009 at 6:40 am
(the part of me that was, in a past life, a stealer of phys­i­cal books, thrills at this)
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Peter says:
October 27, 2009 at 6:09 am
I’m with you though Tim; the in-store fea­tures jumped out at me as a nice fea­ture of this reader (as well as Android and the dual dis­play), even though as you say, they were prob­a­bly inevitable. More mus­ings… I sup­pose this will lead to the cafe expand­ing and the phys­i­cal shelves get­ting dis­placed to some extent. I would be really happy to see some kind of elec­tronic ver­sion of the “staff picks” where the peo­ple who work in the store can post rec­om­men­da­tions to the splash screen you get when you log on in-store.
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jon_hansen says:
October 27, 2009 at 12:05 pm
We could be talk­ing about a whole new way to arrange book­stores. Instead of design­ing stores with the best­sellers upfront, maybe these splash screens Peter men­tions could be placed at the entrance, and from there, users could log in and cre­ate a per­son­al­ized Barnes and Noble that would 1) give them dig­i­tal access to texts any­where and 2) pro­vide a com­pli­men­tary map­ping for those still inter­ested find­ing phys­i­cal texts. I’m envi­sion­ing all the stacks pushed to the perime­ter of the store–sort of like Blockbuster’s new release walls–only the books would have some intri­cate cat­e­go­riza­tion sys­tem that could be eas­ily nav­i­gated from the splash screen or device itself.
Peter, I also like your ideas of the cafe expand­ing; sounds like the whole estab­lish­ment could trans­form from “come buy books at our store” to “come chill at our knowl­edge center.”
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Tim says:
October 27, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Oh, shit, yeah. Also: instant abil­ity to check whether a phys­i­cal copy of the book is in stock (plus of course where you can find it in the store!) It’s like you can be your own B&N employee. 
Also, this isn’t part of the cur­rent Nook func­tion­al­ity, but let’s imag­ine: the Nook 2.0 can either take a pic­ture of or shoot out a lit­tle red scan­ning bar to read a bar code label. This way, you can be brows­ing the stacks, and if you find a book you like, you can insta-load it on your Nook — no typ­ing required.
The Locative Value of the Nook : clusterflock says:
October 27, 2009 at 11:31 am
[…] notes that the Barnes & Noble Nook is tak­ing a decid­edly dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing strat­egy than the Kin­dle: The promise of the Kin dle is that you can buy and read books any where at all — […]
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Ami Marie says:
October 27, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Why am I reminded of the fat peo­ple in the movie Wall E when I read about this elec­tronic book stuff??? Is there some­thing wrong with an actual book? Other than that nasty paper wast­ing thing, and the toxic ink, oh yeah.…the list goes on. But isn’t a Kin­dle or a Nook going to end up in a land­fill too when the newest, lat­est and great­est gad­get hits the scene???? So I guess turn­ing into a blob star­ing at a TV screen is our future.….nevermind!!!
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Tim says:
October 28, 2009 at 5:44 am
Oh, man, Ami Marie… 
Hey, look: here at Snark­mar­ket, we love printed books so much, we made one our­selves. We love them so much, we write love let­ters to 16th-century Venet­ian print­ers. I love books so much that when I broke my arm and couldn’t hold onto a heavy paper­back with two hands, I cried.
At the same time, read­ing machines are inevitable — and what’s more, if they’re done well, they will actu­ally save read­ing, not destroy or dimin­ish it. 
And again, remem­ber: not every­one can get to the book­store to get books, not every­one can hold onto books any­more, not every­one can afford to get their book printed and dis­trib­uted… And above all, not every­thing we read is a book! Or a news­pa­per! Or even a sheet of paper!
We need to make the case for this more often. I’ll try to do that in a post today.
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A.Beth says:
November 30, 2009 at 8:24 am
Not to men­tion, not every­one can read a normal-sized-print book any­more. A good elec­tronic book-displaying device (EBDD? Like Ibid, only all-caps?) can adjust the font size to suit one’s eyes. And if one is liv­ing in a smaller area, that can­not rea­son­ably con­tain the met­ric yardage of shelves one would like to have for one’s books… Elec­tronic books can fit much more eas­ily. (Just have back­ups, is all.)
Peter says:
November 30, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Hav­ing moved from Cal­i­for­nia to New York to Cal­i­for­nia in 13 months to fol­low jobs, I am ready to say good bye to my hun­dreds of pounds and hunderds-of-dollars-in-shipping-fees worth of phys­i­cal books. I don’t think read­ing is a par­tic­u­larly favored method for weight con­trol any­way. Unless you’re read­ing on the tread­mill. And who has ever read any­thing bet­ter than Enter­tain­ment Weekly on the treadmill?
what consumes me, bud caddell » Reading Machines says:
October 27, 2009 at 10:30 pm
[…] Tim Car­mody dis­cusses sin­gle use read­ing machines. […]
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Planner Reads » Blog Archive » Reading Machines says:
October 28, 2009 at 1:10 am
[…] essen­tial dis­cus­sion is brew­ing on e-readers. Tim Car­mody dis­cusses sin­gle use read­ing machines. Jason Kot­tke notices that single-use read­ing machines, the Kin­dle and […]
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The Digital Nomad says:
October 28, 2009 at 7:29 am
Sounds like a wind­fall for AT&T. I won­der how it will com­pete with Kin­dle in the long run?
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Craven solicitations and moaning « Snarkmarket says:
November 1, 2009 at 6:38 pm
[…] any­thing to offer you — except more blog posts about read­ing machines. Really, since I wrote this and this, B&N should just send me an off­i­cal review copy. How­ever, it seems to be an iron […]
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Linked: The Nook and the Places of Books – Novelr - Making People Read says:
November 2, 2009 at 12:06 pm
[…] Sloan has got this thought­ful lit­tle piece over at Snark­mar­ket on Barnes & Noble’s strat­egy with the Nook. Appar­ently, you can read […]
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