Earlier this month, when I called into the Barnes & Noble here in Springfield and when I stepped into one in the St. Louis metro area to check, I had been told that there should be Nooks in the Barnes & Noble stores by the end of the month, and I was hoping to get my hands on one to investigate.

However, it appears that will not be the case after all. Reuters reports that Barnes & Noble is delaying shipments of the Nook to stores in order to fill more holiday pre-orders.

“We expect to have them in our highest-volume stores on December 7th and in a very limited number,” Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating told Reuters. The company had earlier hoped to have a limited number of e-readers in some of its stores around November 30, she said.

Even though it will be disappointing if I am not able to get my hands on a real live Nook, from the point of view of customer satisfaction this was probably the right decision.

Despite the negativity from some quarters that we have reported lately, e-book readers are shaping up to be a hot item this holiday season just as the Kindle was last year. That is good news for the e-book industry in general.

(It also seems pretty clear that news outlets are not paying attention to Barnes & Noble’s unorthodox capitalization scheme for the device’s name, which may come as a relief to certain TeleRead editors.)

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5 COMMENTS

  1. I was at the Albany B&N yesterday. They have the kiosk all set up and ready to go with Nook mockups for people to handle (I have a picture of one in my husband’s hand in case anyone wants to get the “life size” concept).

    The Albany store expected to have a demo unit today (I could hear the store employees discussing it amongst themselves pretty much wherever I went in the store).

    A couple of things that I found interesting:

    1. The Nook kiosk sales clerk was fairly knowledgeable about the Nook, but not about any of the competitors. In fact, he was not even aware of the Spring Alex litigation (and when I asked about it, he immediately tried to tell me that the litigation wasn’t about the Nook, it was about the Kindle. I corrected his understanding). An entirely separate store employee tried to tell me I could read purchases from the Sony eBookstore on a Nook (he was confused about the whole ePub Adobe Digital Editions support logistics). Clearly, B&N has some staff education they need to catch up on.

    2. The store clerk implied that I would have a better chance of getting a back ordered Nook more quickly if I ordered through the store instead of via the web because the store supposedly had a number of units allotted for in store sales… On further questioning, however, I’m not entirely certain about the reliability of this associate’s statement, since he seemed generally ignorant about the web-o-sphere, and web-based purchases, in general.

    3. Again – with a grain of salt – the associate implied that some of the pre-order credit card holds that were happening with pre-orders placed on the webs were, in fact, not happening when you placed the order through the store. Then he changed his story and said that they would only put a $1 hold on your credit card if you pre-ordered. Then he outright said that the “issues with ordering on the web” were not happening with “store orders.”

    In the end, I came away with the opinion that the associate was _really_ trying to make his numbers. He told me that he had sold 40 Nook units thus far (this doesn’t account for any other associates who may have been working the kiosk), which doesn’t sound like a large amount for what is purportedly the 3rd largest sales volume B&N store in the country (again, so sayeth the associate at the Nook kiosk).

    The mockup unit itself, however, was gorgeous, and I’m told that it won’t weigh any more than my iPhone.

    Truth be told, the only reason I didn’t order one on the spot was a.) I have quite a few books on my Sony Reader(s) and iPhone that I need to read. b.) I have even more paperback and hardcover books that I should read before buying more ebooks (and of course, I bought more paper books and magazines while I was in the store – darn this medical leave!), and c.) my husband repeatedly mentioned that this would’ve been my 3rd dedicated reader purchase in the last 18 months…

    Clearly, I need to find the right guitar purchase with which to appease my husband before I bring home my Nook… In the meantime, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy. Le sigh. I want a Nook! Must.have.new.toy.before.everyone.else…

    That said, I’m still better off waiting: I still haven’t seen the Sony Daily Edition or mythical iTablet, yet.

    Apparently, my book lust is being exacerbated by digital reader lust to some order of magnitude, and my reader lust is being exacerbated by the further adoption of ePub and Adobe Digital Editions. This last is not a bad thing… It means that ePub is definitely making strides toward becoming a widely accepted standard – which is a good thing, imho.

  2. Given the current timeframe for recieving a Nook if you purchased now, the associates statement about the Sony bookstore is true. Since once Sony switches their bookstore to use ePub (scheduled for the “end of the year”), you will be able read books purchased from the Sony bookstore on the Nook.

  3. The associate’s statement would’ve been accurate except for the fact that he assumed that titles purchased from the Sony eBookstore today would work with the Nook right now. Further, while Sony seems to have figured out how to work Adobe Digital Editions DRM, other vendors (notably, Simon and Schuster), are still working out the glitches.

    I do not expect that I would immediately be able to read Sony ePub on a Nook out of the box. I’m fairly certain that there will need to be some cooperation between Sony’s Adobe Content Server administrators and the Nook administrators before we’ll have true interoperability.

    Other than just being an attractive, intuitive design, the Nook’s main feature for me is that it does eReader. I’ve got eReader titles going back to the mid-90s, and a fictionwise buywise membership that I haven’t been using because they don’t sell Adobe DE DRM ePub.

    Regardless of my reasons for being interested in the Nook, I still see a need for B&N to do a better job educating their associates on what’s around the corner, and what they need to know right now. Store associates need to be able to answer sophisticated technical questions accurately, in order for the product to be favorably presented to both the newbie AND the informed eBooker potential customer.

    I don’t think I’m being too persnickety taking this position. Accuracy of information that I’m provided when making purchasing decisions is definitely one of the primary factors in whether or not I buy a product.

  5. Interesting. I went to the about link for the actual site (http://goodereader.com/). They say they are in Vancouver, and the site was displaying prices in US Dollars (I thought there was a chance that it was displaying CAD given the supposed origin of the site…

    That said, I have a Firefox plugin that tells me from what country the currently displayed URL originated from, and despite the statement that “goodereader” is located in Vancouver, they are coming to me through a US IP address, so I don’t know what to think.

    Point is moot WRT the Nook, however, as the web site currently says they are “Sold Out” and have none in stock (no big surprise there).

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