An eBook Reader with WiFi Connectivity

Now we're getting somewhere!

The Atlantic Home

Oct 20 2009, 5:04 pm by Derek Thompson

Barnes & Noble Nook Looks Like a Kindle-Killer
The e-reader arms race is on, and Barnes & Noble is the latest manufacturer to unveil its shiny, super-literate weapon. The Nook might not have the razzle-dazzle of the rumored Apple Tablet, but it's got brand name gravitas, WiFi, a color touchscreen -- enough for the Gizmodo boys to gloat that it "eats the [Amazon] Kindle's lunch." But the Barnes and Noble e-reader has another especially interesting twist: Book lending.


Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader, expected to be unveiled on Tuesday at a news conference in Manhattan, features Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability for customers to lend out e-books for 14 days at a time.

This is obviously great for consumers (provided they have a e-reader). Maybe Barnes & Noble's calculus is that the ability to share will encourage more people to buy books because it increases the books' utility. For example, I'm somewhat interested in buying sports writer Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball, but I might be more interested if I knew that I could lend the book to all my friends who read Simmons on ESPN every week so that we could talk about it later. This dream assumes, of course, that e-readers become as common as iPods. We're not there yet, but this explosion of e-readers from Amazon, B&N, Sony and others suggest that somebody smells a market waiting to blow up.
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Brock C. October 20, 2009 9:55 PM
Derek, you misunderstand how the Nook's lending works. The eBooks B&N is selling can be read on any PC, Mac, iPhone or iPod Touch, not just the Nook; so the universe of people you can lend books too just got a lot bigger.

I also think the most interesting part of the lending thing is that B&N clearly got the publishers and authors' guild to agree to some sort of DRM scheme, otherwise how can the 14 day limit be enforced? What is the limit of this DRM scheme? Can they delete books from the Nook just like Amazon deleted 1984 from the Kindle? What happens if B&N's DRM server goes offline? Can you still read your books?