This Christmas was “A Tale of Two E-Book Readers”: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
For the Kindle, “it was the best of times.” According to Henry Blodget at the Silicon Alley Insider, on Christmas Day, for the first time, Amazon actually sold more Kindle e-books than printed tree-books.
Granted this is probably due to all the people who got them for Christmas firing them up and buying, but as Blodget notes, it is still a good sign for the future of e-books in general.
For the Nook, however, “it was the worst of times.” Vladislav Savov at Engadget points out that Barnes & Noble was apparently unprepared for the Christmas rush of e-book purchases. Its servers collapsed under the load, refusing to let anyone who bought an e-book download it at all until early the morning of the 26th.
I wonder how many Nooks were returned on Boxing Day?
Well Chris, Sony had the same problem. http://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/12/26/sony-reader-site-buckles-under-load/ All the more reason for me to stick with my Blackberry rather than a dedicated reader. Personally I wouldn’t buy any of them.
Are we sure the fault lies with B&N?
Aren’t they relying on somebody else’s datacenter and ebook servers? (The same for Sony.) Their problems could be due to capacity, hardware bottlenecks, or even software. Online retailing is not a trivial undertaking. Just slapping a wireless module inside you gadget and connection to a server does not guarantee a viable cloud-connected product. Its a whole different game they’re getting into.
Ultimately, responsibility *does* lie with the B&N managers, but it isn’t clear how their sites are run, so their mistake may have simply been choosing the wrong partners.
Amazon, of course, runs its own datacenters and servers and fully understands the tech involved as they *created* all of it. Plus, they built their back end big enough they have capacity to spare and sell as yet another retail product.
I’d posit that what we are seeing is the difference between a competent online retailer with a decade plus of experience versus a B&M newcomer (B&N) and a pure hardware vendor (Sony) neither of whom is particuarly savvy about the technology behind online retailng. Sony, in particular, has a history of tone-deaf decisions and botched online operations with their other products, particularly their Playstation network.
Connected device buyers have learned that the quality of the back-end services matter *at least* as much as the quality and features of the gadget itself, hence the success of the iPod/itunes and XBOX 360/LIVE combos, and the “debate” surrounding iPhone/ATT, among others.
It’ll be a while before anybody can say with any certainty that Whispernet and the Amazon ebook store are clearly superior to their competitors’ offerings but it *is* clear that neither B&N nor Sony made a good first impression; their climb just got steeper.
And ebook buyers now know there is a third component to factor into buying decisions.
Amazon struggled to keep up with initial Kindle orders, souring the market vociferously. No one even talks about that anymore. And holiday-overwhelmed servers are old news, people are already familiar with and used to that issue.
Whatever troubles B&N had during its admittedly rushed Christmas rollout will be forgotten by Joe and Jane Average come this time next year. They’ll more likely be too concerned with issues like whose e-books can be read on whose devices to worry about clogged internet access.
What no one outside the 3 vendors (Amazon, B&N, and Sony) knows are the numbers involved. It could be that Amazon was better prepared or that B&N and Sony had 10 times the traffic that Amazon did. Without real numbers it is impossible to tell what happened and why.
And when Amazon says it sold more ebooks than pbooks on Christmas day, if it sold 1 ebook that was more than the number of pbooks it sold — Amazon, like most retailers, doesn’t count something as a sale until a credit card is billed and Amazon doesn’t charge a credit card until an order is shipped, which wasn’t possible for pbooks on Christmas day but was possible for ebooks.
All of this has to be taken with a ton of salt until real numbers are reported.
My wife is a librarian. She had to work Saturday – the day after Christmas.
She had lots of patrons come in with their new Kindles expecting to be able to check out books from the library to read on their new ereader gizmo.
She patiently explained that was not possible. All of those people were shocked/upset.
The Teleread mantra: Kindle good, everyone else bad.
Second verse, same as the first.
Haha HeavyG. You would think, in an ideal world, this would be true, no? But some libraries are letting patrons download ebooks and audiobooks to their PCs. Does your wife’s library do this? Overdrive.
Hey, I wanted to like the Nook. I thought it would let me read my eReader books, and browse the Internet like the Kindle. But it turns out the latter is not true, and I haven’t heard anything about the former.
I got my nook on Christmas day and it worked fine. Still does. I experienced no problems downloading books from B&N. The nook is a brilliant device, I cannot understand why people seem to be so critical of it.
Ahaeger: Want to write a guest post headlined: “In defense of the Nook”? I’d love to give people both sides. I can understand Chris’s concern. As you can see, he was a big user of the old eReader format, and B&N left him stranded. I’m disappointed the Nook can’t read both the old and new versions.
I’m reachable at dr TeleRead.org. In email, put this headline over your essay: TeleRead contribution.
Thanks,
David
My nook accepts my old eReader files. I’ve added a 2 gig microsd card (not really easy to do). I’ve also sideloaded PDF books and files (you have to play with the font sizes). A few books and files it doesn’t display correct titles (only gibberish) but the books themselves are OK.
Needless to say the more books you inhabit your nook with, the more complicated it gets to maintain them. (no folders or categories) The B&N ebooks I purchased or selected months ago appeared in my list of books on day one. Some Google books are not digitized text but “picture” copies of the text pages and won’t reformat.
The nook has been rooted and links on Teleread posts will tell you how to do internet, twitter, etc. I figure there will be software solutions soon to access these other types of applications. There are geeks out there who think the nook is god’s gift to free internet and version 1.1 didn’t freeze them out.
Figure it out – it’s an Android device – lot’s will be possible in further iterations. Just remember it’s not the fastest digital reader around.
HeavyG, they could read library books if they had a Sony 🙂
Of course, my Sony cannot ‘read to me’ the way the Kindle can, and it has no dictionary (I don’t need one when I read in English, but I do when I read in French). So I am contemplating a new purchase even though my Sony is otherwise in good shape…
And yet, it has happened again. A year to the day. Servers down for 2 days now. Cannot download books, account locked up. An hour on hold waiting for Customer Service. I will be spending Monday taking back my Nook and purchasing a Kindle. To fall prey to the same issues and not learn the lessons is inexcusable in this day and age. Too many other folks waiting to take my money, which I’m happy to give as long as they understand the intricacies of customer service and basic “planning”. FRIGHTENING!!