Amazon has recently released a whole slew of new Kindle E-readers. But what everybody is talking about is the Kindle Fire (Amazon’s answer to the iPad). With its content and low price point many people are saying it is the new must have product. All this new hype makes it easy to overlook the Barnes and Nobles Nook Color. The three new Kindle models starting at just $79 have the possibility to drive the Nook under.
With a $249 price tag it will be no match for the newly announced $199 Amazon Kindle Fire if B&N don’t do something quick. Amazon offers a large amount of content for their new tablet. Which includes thousands of songs, streaming movies, TV shows, Kindle books, the Amazon App store, magazines and newspapers. So is all hope lost for B&N this Holiday season…It might not be.
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Kindle vs Nook :The E-reader wars are upon us
Although Amazon is clearly going to dominate in the e-reader (and maybe tablet) market for some time to come. I know that B&N is not stupid. They are going to radically cut the price of the Nook Color to Kindle Touch territory. Then they are going to flaunt the fact that theirs has a color screen. Advertising campaigns will flaunt how there low price option can show animated children’s books and stream Pandora internet radio.
This price cut would not hurt B&N as the Nook Color is about a year and a half old now and has aging hardware. I am also quite confident that B&N has something else already in the pipeline. This is the company that ruthlessly put Borders out of business. They are not going down without a fight.
Barnes and Nobles Nook Touch is just as good as the Kindle Touch and it even has a few pros. The cheapest Kindle touch is $99 but that includes Amazon’s special offers. Which are just adds that show up as screensavers. Now this may not bothersome, but for others it can enrage. So if you want to remove the special offers the device will now costs you $139 which is the same as the Nook Touch. The Nook Touch also has hardware buttons for page turning something the Kindle Touch does not have. You can also upload your own pictures to the Nook Touch and use them as screensavers for the device. Something that Amazon does not offer.
So at the end of the day Barnes and Nobles still have really good products that can compete with Amazon. Although B&N don’t have the name recognition of Kindle they do have thousands of retail stores that attract millions of customers. This makes it easy for B&N to show potential customers how good their products are. And if these people are already shopping at B&N for books instead of Amazon than they may trust B&N more for their first journey into e-reading. Barnes and Nobles prominently displays the Nooks in their stores and lets people try them out. They even have friendly staff always available to talk about the features of their E-readers. The Nook is not dead and Barnes and Nobles are not giving up without a fight. The future will only tell who will be the last company standing in the coming E-reader wars.
Noah Shearer is the Editor and Chief of the tech blog The Technolon To read more of Noah Shearer’s articles check out his website at www.thetechnolon.com
