There have been some big shifts in e-books lately.
First, a judge this week found that Apple was guilty of price-fixing e-books â€" colluding with other e-book vendors to keep prices high. Apple says it will appeal the decision.
Second, Barnes & Noble’s chief executive, William Lynch, has resigned. He was appointed in March 2010 to lead the bookseller into the high-tech age (he had been an executive at Palm and Home Shopping Network). But sales haven’t been going well with Barnes & Noble, electronically or otherwise.
I’ve had my clashes with Mr. Lynch. Twice, I’ve publicly called out the company for cheating in the way it advertised its Nook e-readers. Once, it understated the Nook’s weight by an ounce. Another time, it advertised a Nook to have a high-definition screen when it didn’t.
“Look, Barnes. Listen, Noble,†I wrote. “You have a perfectly good product. You don’t have to stretch the truth to sell it.â€
Mr. Lynch called me up, deeply upset, to ask if I had some kind of ax to grind with Barnes & Noble (I didn’t, and don’t). But in both cases, he did order the advertising changed to correct the misleading specs.
But his departure, I suspect, has to do with the failure of the Nook over all. According to the research firm IDC, Barnes & Noble’s tablet market share wasn’t even in the top five for the first three months of this year.
Last week, Barnes & Noble said that it would stop making color Nook tablets. That’s it: Amazon won that battle, and has no more competition.
(Barnes & Noble says that the color tablets will be “co-branded with yet-to-be-announced third-party manufacturers of consumer electronics products,†whatever that means. Barnes & Noble will still design and sell the black-and-white tablets, like the Nook SimpleTouch and Glowlight.)
It’s really too bad. The color Nooks were easily competitive with Amazon’s Kindle Fire â€" better in many ways. The color Nooks could run any Android app, not just a handpicked special selection. They have memory-card slots so you can expand the storage.
In fact, CNET argues that there’s never been a better time to buy a color Nook, since the company has slashed the prices. At the moment, they cost far less than Amazon’s equivalent Kindle: $130 for the 7-inch model (Amazon’s is $200), $150 for the 9-incher (Amazon’s is $270).
The problem, of course, is the copy protection. Idiotically, each tech giant in the e-book game (Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble) developed a different, incompatible form of copy protection for its books. Once Barnes & Noble drops out of the game completely, any e-books you bought for your Nook will probably become unreadable. Betamaxed, you might say.
(Yes, there are Nook apps for Mac and Windows, but Barnes & Noble abandoned them some time ago. There’s also a way to read these books on a Web page, but it doesn’t work for many e-book titles. The company still has a Windows 8 app that can read its books.)
So the bottom line is all bad news. People who bought e-books from Barnes & Noble may wind up with libraries they can’t read. Amazon no longer has a competitor to keep it on its toes (and its prices low). The future of Barnes & Noble’s e-book business now looks murky, which means that even more customers will stay away, creating a vicious cycle of declining sales.
In the end, it may be that all we can salvage from this smoking mess is a lesson or two â€" although what they might be escapes me at the moment.
