Skip to main content

Buy a Nook HD+, Get a $50 Gift Card

nook hd theresa horner personal Barnes & Noble started their after-Christmas Nook clearance sales today. The first item to go up for sale is B&N’s 9″ enhanced ereader / media device, the Nook HD+.

Buy one of these ereaders between now and 11 March and you will also get a $50 B&N store credit that can be used to buy ebooks, movies, magazines, newspapers, TV shows, and more. The credit is good on all Nook HD+ purchased on www.Nook.com or in one of Barnes & Noble’s 692 691 690 689 stores across the US.

Similar Articles


Comments


Rob Siders February 26, 2013 um 8:59 pm

Zing! Zing!


Rob Siders February 26, 2013 um 8:59 pm

Of course, this means I’m buying one.


Ben February 26, 2013 um 9:58 pm

Barely making margin and now basically giving it away at a lost…it’s no wonder they are losing shirts on Nook.


Mike Cane February 27, 2013 um 7:12 am

I’m convinced that’s the tablet that sunk them. Expensive to create, expensive to build, hardly any sales. No wonder it’s the first they’re trying to unload. I wonder when they stopped production?

Nate Hoffelder February 27, 2013 um 7:25 am

Nah, it was the Nook Tablet that done them in, along with the still-not-yet updated Nook Touch.

The Nook Tablet was supposed to be priced at $350. I think that accurately reflects B&N’s costs, and that means they have been losing money on it since 2011.


fjtorres February 27, 2013 um 7:35 am

I suspect B&N has been building their hardware in single upfrant batches to get the best component prices. So they order, upfront, as many as they think they’ll ever sell and warehouse them, like books, for the next two, tree years.

What leads me to that were the reports out of Taiwan in early 2010 was that their Nook shipments in the first four months were way bigger than Amazon’s Kindle shipments, leading some to assume they were selling faster than Kindle. Instead, they were still available on their website, as new, well into 2012. And I dount they were still building original Nooks in 2011.

And then there is the STR, two years old and subject of a couple of BOGO deals and a $50 Black Friday and still in stock. It is even a centerpiece of their (limited) international expansion. So either they keep building the things long after they should have known their appeal had peaked, or their guaranteed minimum order is way bigger than the market will support.
Clearly they *are* overestimating demand by a *lot*. Consistently.

Personally, I think a simple software tweak to enable app sideloading would clear out the HD+ inventory faster (and way cheaper) than the $50 cards which are costing them $35 or more each. As is, they’re just doubling down on the lockdown, looking for a price low enough that consumers will ignore the lack of apps.

But I’m sure the B&N apologists will insist infallible B&N is doing the absolute best possible under a situation beyond anybody’s control. It is *not* miscalculation at all.

Nate Hoffelder February 27, 2013 um 7:49 am

"So either they keep building the things long after they should have known their appeal had peaked, or their guaranteed minimum order is way bigger than the market will support. Clearly they *are* overestimating demand by a *lot*. Consistently."

That could explain why the STR was the only ereader not updated last year with a better screen.


fjtorres February 27, 2013 um 7:51 am

The Nook STR cost about $100 to build, circa 2011 (judging by the Kindle teardown estimates) so if they had horribly miscalculated and had 10 million of the things lying around, that would be a cool billion tied up in inventory. (More realistically, 2-3 million STRs too many would eat up the MS investment. So I’m guessing they had about 2 million STRs too many by last spring.)
Now, since the Nook Color sold about 350K in its first year, they couldn’t have rationally ordered more than a million Nook tablets, right? (Surely they weren’t expecting sales to more than triple, right?) Figure a build cost of around $200 each (the price of the FIRE) and that would be another $100-200 Million tied up in unsold hardware. (Theoretically they could be in deeper but I doubt they were really that reckless.)

Something like $300 million in unsold inventory is not out of the question. And that is without factoring in the 2012 hardware.
Not much by consumer electronics standards, where Sony has bled up to a billion a year for ages. But for B&N…
They really needed to IPO Nook last summer, didn’t they?


fjtorres February 27, 2013 um 7:59 am

Nate said: "That could explain why the STR was the only ereader not updated last year with a better screen."

The low-end K4 got a different color case and some software tweaks but no change in specs, yet the new version is reported to have a sightly whiter background. Ditto for the Sony T2.
Not so for the STR.
So yes, the evidence suggests the currently-selling STRs were built in 2011, possible *early* 2011. No hardware slipstreaming is apparent.

(BTW, the reply link isn’t working for me.)


Nate Hoffelder February 27, 2013 um 8:08 am

The reply button isn’t working for me either.


fjtorres February 27, 2013 um 8:13 am

Good to know I don’t need to debug my PC. 🙂
Tomorrow is going to be awfully interesting, no?


willem February 27, 2013 um 10:04 am

Looks like they took the same supply chain logistics powering their book buying and applied it to their hardware chain with nary a thing changed. Bizarre.

If your intriguing speculations on unsold inventory is anywhere near correct the Nook as hardware has run its course.

Nate Hoffelder February 27, 2013 um 10:08 am

That was an idea that had been raised in an earlier discussion. I wish we could get info that could confirm it.


fjtorres February 27, 2013 um 11:16 am

We may find out something tomorrow.
Companies can’t sit on unsold inventory forever; sooner or later they have to write it down and recognize the associated losses.


fjtorres February 27, 2013 um 4:11 pm

Nate said: "That was an idea that had been raised in an earlier discussion. I wish we could get info that could confirm it."

I did a bit of digging to reinforce my recollection of the times and found this bit of memorabilia:

"Nook outnumbers Kindle in March, says Digitimes Research

[Monday 26 April 2010]

Manufacturers' e-book reader shipments to Barnes & Noble surpassed those to Amazon in March 2010, as demand for nook was picking up, according to Digitimes Research.

Digitimes Research senior analyst Mingchi Kuo cited figures from upstream suppliers as indicating that the nook accounted for 53% of e-book readers shipped to US vendors last month.

Kuo attributed to the nook’s strong shipments partly to consumers' interest in new products, as Amazon’s Kindle has already been on the market for some time.

Barnes & Noble also has extra competitiveness in its own retail outlets across the US, Kuo explained.

Amazon has also started selling its Kindle at Target stores. Previously the Amazon e-book reader was only available online.

Global e-book reader shipments totaled 1.43 million units in the first quarter of 2010, and will grow to 2.02 million units in the second quarter, according to Digitimes Research.

Worldwide shipments for 2010 will reach 11.40 million units, up from 3.82 million in 2009, Digitimes Research added."

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100426VL204.html


Write a Comment