Things are starting to look bad for the Nook. Real bad. Today, Barnes & Noble announced the beginning of their “Spread the Word About Nook Program” which will run until June 14, 2013. If you can somehow convince a close friend to spend $199 on a new Nook HD, B&N will give you and the purchaser a $25 gift card. This program effectively turns Nook customers into multilevel marketing sales reps.
The offer is also good for the Nook HD+, but the fact that they are including the 7″ Nook HD in the program shows that moving their larger, more expensive tablet isn’t their only problem now. Most of the offers I have received for B&N gift cards have solely involved the Nook HD+. Now, it seems that they are having to add special offers to incentivize the purchase of their 7″ HD tablet as well.
As Nathan reported recently, B&N has been vying for attention ever since their poor holiday sales season came to a close. Over half-a-dozen different gift card offers have arrived in my inbox since then, and while I applaud B&N for being a company that helps their customers save money, the frequency of these offers is starting to make me worry. Could things really be that bad that they have to bribe customers to sell Nooks to their friends and coworkers? Word of mouth is a great way to advertise, but this seems more like a last-ditch effort to put Nook sales on life support.
I have a hard enough time getting my friends to sign up for free Dropbox accounts so that I can get extra storage space from these referrals. It will be interesting to see if this program turns out to be a success or not.
I don’t like these sorts of programs no matter which company does them. I value my friendships too much to become off-putting field sales reps!
Yeah, there is always the awkward moment when you ask your friend to walk down to Barnes & Noble with you so you can watch them spend $200 and get a gift card in return.
My friend has a Nook Glo and she jumped on my ass to buy one when I said I was looking for my first ebook reader. I went with the Kindle Paperwhite because I never liked any Nook model that I found on display at my local Staples and I always liked the look and feel of the older Kindle models, and the Paperwhite is the best version of them all IMHO.
I do prefer buying new print books from Barnes and Noble’s website then Amazon, however. Cheaper shipping and they always ship directly from the nearest warehouse (a mere hour away) rather than Kentucky (I live in the Northeast). So I get two-day shipping even though I paid for the standard 5-7 day.
Wonder how this will effect B&N’s e-book division. Will they continue selling e-books? Will they continue to have my purchases available for me to download?
I just went through 3 pages of books I purchased from Books On Board to make sure I have everything downloaded. I’m really going to miss them, they had great sales and last week I purchased about 10 books from them!
Yes, it is a wise decision to download all of your eBook purchases all the time, no matter who you buy them from. Who’s to say where B&N, Amazon, or Kobo will be 15 years from now. Publishers could band together and pull all their titles. Companies could go out of business. Titles could be remotely deleted when you connect to WiFi and so on. I use Calibre to catalog and backup all of my eBooks. Thanks for reading.
What B&N needs to do is CHANGE the darned Nook to allow more reader control. A real bookshelf that allows you to control the order the books are in, not just by-author or by-title. More fonts and the option to go get your own.
But instead, they look for ways to push their “designed by us so it must be perfect” Nook out to more folks.
Were it not for a few magazines that I like in color, I’d dump the Nook and get an E-ink reader for books and a real tablet for all the other stuff.
Sorry if my anger is slipping into this post, but I really like my Nook HD+. I just hate the reading tools it comes with.
Gary
Nathan Just received a mailer today from B&N with a coupon for 50.00 off nook HD Tablet now 149 or 90.00 off nook hd+ now 179. Had the nook hd for about a week and returned it. Forgot how locked down it is.. They really must be desperate now.
Poor B&N is so clueless. The price isn’t what’s wrong their tablets. They could knock $100 off and people still wouldn’t want them because like you said they are too locked down, not to mention app and feature-lacking. Which is a shame because the HD+ is one of my favorite tablets with its unique 3:2 ratio high-res screen. It’s about the perfect size.
Nathan what do you think of the new Samsung Galaxy 8 tablet ??
I really like 8 inch tablets, better than 7 inch tablets even, but I just don’t get why the Galaxy 8 is so expensive. I realize it’s got the pen and all, but I just don’t have any use for that sort of thing. Makes it much more of a niche item.
If they would just put normal android on it it would change it from a p.o.s. to a great tablet and boost sales. Or give away SD cards with cm10 on them instead of a gift card