“Barnes & Noble Inc., ramping up its competitive duel with Amazon.com Inc., unveiled temporary price cuts for its Nook tablets and e-readers for consumers who buy either People magazine or New York Times Nook subscriptions,” Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Until March, the price of the Nook Tablet will be cut by $50 to $199 for those who buy it with a Nook subscription to People, Barnes & Noble said,” Trachtenberg reports. “The offer puts the Nook tablet’s upfront price tag on par with Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet.”
Trachtenberg reports, “At the same time, anyone who buys a one-year Nook subscription to the New York Times will receive either the Nook Simple Touch e-reader for nothing or the Nook Color e-reader for $99. The Nook Simple Touch’s usual price is $99 while the Nook Color’s regular price is $199.”
Read more in the full article here.
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Until Barnes & Noble finds a buyer for their Nook division, they are goosing sales with this loss-leader as a way to keep the numbers looking not too bad.
Maybe … they will need to give them away free to sell their books.
Must’ve been a bad Holiday Season. Smells of desperation.
.
Kindle Fire is making it very difficult for any competitor (that is not Apple) to make a profit with tablets.
Customers who want a full-featured high-quality tablet will still buy an iPad. No one wants to pay the same price as iPad to buy a fake iPad.
Meanwhile, customers who are unwilling (or unable) to pay $500 for a tablet may (or may not) get a Kindle Fire. But they would not have purchased an iPad, as least not as their first tablet. So Amazon’s initial market share comes from expanding the tablet market, not from taking iPad customers from Apple. In the long run, a larger tablet market (thanks to Kindle Fire) will help Apple sell more iPads.
Now, Barnes & Noble wants to play Amazon’s game, and sell the device at no profit, then hope to make a profit from selling content. Google may enter this fight at the low end as well.
Everyone else is caught between not being able to match iPad on quality and usability, and not being able to undersell Kindle Fire on price. In other words, you can’t make a profit trying to beat iPad. And Kindle Fire is “blocking” the low end, because most competitors cannot try the “content” strategy. Apple will end up making most of the available profit in tablets.
The step siblings are fighting. Very good!
B&N had me at $50-$100 savings. They lost me at having to buy People or the NYT.
(Serves me right for even thinking of being unfaithful to Apple.)
Keep the Nook; throw away the People subscription.