The early to mid 2000s saw a wave of technological improvements and updates. The smartphone was introduced, along with tablets and multiple portable electronic devices, such as EBooks.
As Lady Gaga fans around the world sang along to “Bad Romance” in November of 2009, Barnes & Noble released its first Nook device for $259. The e-reader had an E Ink display with an LCD color screen. Barnes & Noble managed to attain over 1 million e-book titles within the Nook’s first year of release.
In late 2010, the book company released the Nook Color. On Christmas Day alone, over 1 million e-books were bought. A major innovation was that this new Nook could support apps as well as e-books. The Nook Color would eventually be declared Barnes & Noble’s most successful tablet, though multiple more versions would slowly be released over the next five years.
The Nook Simple Touch joined the family the following year, debuting a more minimalist design. Users were now able to to lend books to friends (though only once per title). Later the same year the Nook Tablet was introduced and it featured an increased memory, higher resolution, and CPU. Readers were also able to record their own voices on the tablet, allowing for playback while reading a story.
In 2012, the Nook Simple Touch really broke ground: the tablet’s entire screen was illuminated with a built-in light. Barnes & Noble had managed to acquire the adaptation from E Ink Holdings, as well as a contracted agreement disallowing the competition from using similar technology.
Later on that year the Nook HD and the Nook HD+ were released. Unfortunately, the prices for these two options were rather expensive when compared to other tablets: buyers could spend $269 on a Nook HD+, or they could spend about $100 more for an iPad and everything that came with it.
Barnes & Nobles partnered with Samsung in 2014. With the partnership came the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook; it has the same specifications as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 4 10.1.
Since 2015, five more Nook tablets have been released.
The Nook has not been the most successful e-reader, partly because Barnes & Noble focused heavily on the US market, as opposed to other companies who pushed their similar products in international markets as well. In 2014, Barnes & Noble also began preventing users from downloading e-books they had purchased from the Nook store, in order to stop encryption stripping or reading books on third-party apps. Compared to a year and a half ago, Nook sales have fallen over 22 percent. Kindle and iPad tablets have been steadily gaining popularity, in part because they offer more possibilities of use compared to the Nook.
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