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B&N Education Has Pulled the Nook Displays From its Stores

1099291562_1f6e8ff031_oB&N Education is reaping a new benefit from its split with the retail half of Barnes & Noble last year.

Last month B&N Ed shut down Yuzu, the blighted digital textbook platform that B&N Ed took with it during the spin off, and now the company is chucking the Nook hardware.

Teleread reports that B&N Ed pulled the Nook display from its B&N College bookstores some time in the past few months:

I happened to cruise by my local Barnes & Noble College bookstore today at IUPUI, about a half hour before closing time to look around. I had it in mind to take another in-person peek at the Nook devices they had on display there, but to my surprise, the display was nowhere to be found. The only Nook accessories I saw were some cases in the 50%-off clearance bin.

When I asked the clerk at the counter about this, he told me that the display had been removed two or three weeks ago, because the Nooks belonged to the branch of the business that ran the stores in the malls and they were really better suited to those stores—among other things, those stores had Internet access, and the campus Barnes & Noble didn’t. As far as he knew, they wouldn’t be available even by special order.

nook display barnes noble collegeOne of the  displays can be seen at right.

This is truly shocking news.

Oh, I’m not surprised that the display was dropped; I am shocked that it was still in the stores in January 2016.

It should have been removed a long time ago, both because the platform was withering but also because it didn’t make any sense to push Nook hardware to college students.

The Nook hardware was never a good match for college bookstores; neither the tablet or the ereader were geared toward the academic market, and in fact the only reason it could command space was that B&N owned the brand. Any other company would have had to pay dearly for the square footage (for example, I saw a Microsoft-branded UMPC display in a B&N College store a decade ago).

The hardware displays should have been dropped at the beginning of the last school year, if not earlier, but there’s no way for us to tell why the displays were being kept in the stores (contract?, at the command of B&N corporate in NYC?).

In any case, does anyone else find it interesting that in a few short months B&N Ed has discarded both of the failed digital products it inherited from its former parent company?

image by keone

 

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Comments


Fjtorres April 25, 2016 um 4:53 pm

Well, their finances aren’t supposed to be so hot so…
…Triage Time!


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