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Posts Tagged ‘barnes & noble’

Your New BEAU: Don’t Judge a Book…

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

The bond between books and film is complex. Of course you have your book-to-movie transformations—always somewhat hit or miss, depending on the people behind the film. The Oscars was replete with such films this year, really boosting book sales. You have you truly successful film adaptations, and your utter flops. A good adaptation can act as a great advertisement for the book—whether you see the movie and pick up the book at B&N on the way home from the theater or (if you’re like me) you see an intriguing movie trailer and endeavor to finish the book before the film comes out in theaters.

Now the book/film relationship has really been taken to the nest level: book trailers. With so many people with their eyes glued to the internet, surfing at light-speed from one website to the next gathering bites of info, book trailers seem like a very creative and logical step: short, audio/visual and available on YouTube.  One need not read back covers or inside flaps or find descriptions on Amazon, just sit back and watch a preview of the book.

Do book trailers really work as a marketing tool for books? Hard to say. The concept is not yet a regularly used marketing tool; not every new book out there has a trailer (probably for the best). But some of them are quite creative. If you like book trailers, you can get a steady stream of them at Shelf Awareness. They post a link to a new trailer every day.

Just some food for thought. I mostly made this post because the trailers are my favorite part of going to the movies.  Can’t say book trailers will ever be my favorite part of reading a book. But, like millions of people out there, I’m a sucker for the fleeting amusement of YouTube A/V bites and there are at least 40 video clips now linked to this blog post. Let the clip-watching marathon begin!

Also, dancing books!

 

Your New BEAU: the future of Barnes & Noble

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Barnes and Noble has been all over the news! Well, at least news in the publishing world. It would seem that B&N and Amazon.com are butting heads in a number of arenas. What does it mean for their future?

Firstly, the Kindle v. Nook battle. Well, the Kindle v. Nook v. iPad battle, I should say.The different devices have some fundamental distinctions. The iPad seems to come out the overall winner, as Apple products tend to do, with the ability to e-read (can you verb that?) and so so much more. But just looking at the [much cheaper than the iPad] basic e-readers, the Nook beat out the Kindle by Consumer Reports ratings. And yet, it would seem that the Kindle is less expensive, has a larger library with cheaper ebooks and has more apps and such available. The Nook? Has more RAM, more memory, a larger screen and is more lightweight.  The choice is yours. It’s still unclear which is doing better sales-wise.

Secondly, B&N’s patent-infringement case with Microsoft. Word on the street is, Microsoft demands that B&N pay exorbitant licensing fees for the Microsoft Android technology used in the Nook. Bloomberg News thinks B&N will win out, but Microsoft says Amazon pays the same demanded fees for the Android tech in their Kindle Fire. Eek.

Thirdly, and most dramatically (yes, the B&N entanglements with Amazon can get still worse…), B&N made a “declaration of war” stating that they will not stock Amazon published books in their stores (though they will sell them online) in protest of Amazon’s “exclusivity” with publishers, “undermining the industry as a whole,” claiming that Amazon has “prevented millions of customers from having access to content.” Sadly for B&N, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has not such qualms with Amazon and has agreed to distribute its books in print. So, while B&N sticks their principles, Amazon still wins out in this battle and HMH snags the deal.

Barnes and Noble still stands as the world’s largest bookstore, but for how long? With Borders gone, B&N should be reaping the benefits, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. What would the world look like without B&N and with Amazon as reigning champion? I hope it does not come to this. I respect the world’s right to ebooks, but the idea that print will cease to exist is incomprehensible. Maybe print will go “underground” and become the medium of rebels and revolutionaries, oppressed by the “conventionals” with their heads in the iCloud. That’s actually a neat idea for some future-dystopia story a la Clockwork Orange or 1984, but I’d rather it not come to that.

Stay strong, B&N. Don’t leave us.

Your New Beau. 

 

le BEAU mot- E-books Aren’t in Kansas Anymore

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Yesterday Barnes & Noble released their new e-reader, the Nook Color with a 7 inch color touch screen, WiFi, and an Android platform that will feature a growing number of “Nook extras” including games and video. There will also be social networking tools, music features, magazines, newspapers, a shop, pictures, lending, borrowing…is anyone else out of breath from reading that features list? Oh, and you can read books on it too. Did I mention that? While Amazon stresses the readability of its newest line of Kindles, Barnes & Noble seems to be pushing for a spot next to the iPad as the newest hot gadget.

So my question is…what happened to reading? While I consider myself a purist who truly enjoys the feel of a physical book in the hands (also may be known as old fashioned), I hoped that the increasing popularity of e-books might encourage formerly reluctant readers to pick up the habit. If you can pick up one of the classics or the latest as casually as choosing a song from your now ubiquitous iPod, it should lower the barrier for excuses. And for awhile, the excitement of trying something new did seem to spur new readers. While the time-worn purists refused to be sullied by the newest fad of digital consumption, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people were jumping in with gleeful abandon. And many found that they enjoyed reading. They enjoyed the experience of discovering characters, getting lost in a story, being transported to an entirely new place by the words of a skilled writer. And so while some may debate whether these digital units can truly be considered books, readers were experiencing the same joy that a hardcover or paperback would bring.

Now though, if Barnes & Noble’s new whiz-bang Nook Color is any indication, simply reading may no longer be enough. Now your “book” must also be able to communicate with friends, check email, show videos, and play games as well. And to me at least, it is ironic that the company who boasted their first e-reader as being backed by “the bookstore you grew up with” is the first to put out a product that is no longer focused solely on the reading experience, while the upstart young tech company that is Amazon continues to push what is essentially a portable personal library. Will this leap to embrace new technology help or hinder “the world’s largest bookstore”? Only time will tell.