Barnes and Noble CEO Ron Boire broke the news via press release that their Nook eReader is not competing well with Amazon’s Kindle reader. Therefore, he has made the decision to shut down the Nook apps and operating systems.
March 15th has been set as the date when: “customers will also not be able to rent or purchase video content from the NOOK video store, which will be closed down completely on 30 April. If customers want to keep the content they’ve already purchased, the need to transfer content to other providers.
If you’ve bought Disney, Pixar, Marvel or Star Wars content, you need to open an account with Disney Movies Anywhere, while all other content will now require the opening of a CinemaNow account. If you haven’t done so by 30 April, you lose the content you’ve purchased.”
After March 15, B&N customers not be able to rent or purchase video content from the NOOK video store. Plans are to close the store completely by April 20th. Nook owners will need to transfer all of their content to another provider, reader, or utilize cloud data storage.
Additionally, Boire stated:
BN.com,represents a big opportunity for us and is a very important component of our omni-channel offering. While we are encouraged the site’s improved performance during the third quarter, we still have work to do to improve sales.
We have undertaken major projects to improve the user experience, including a re-design of the front-end, improving SEO by re-engineering certain elements of the site, and improving BN.com’s search tool so that it’s more relevant and intuitive to the customer’s query.
Beyond the desktop experience, we’re also making investments to improve our mobile and tablet experience. Today, over half of our site traffic is driven by mobile. We will improve our mobile experience to provide a great experience, whether it’d be on a phone or a tablet. We are also in the process of consolidating multiple B&N apps into a single customer experience.
While we remain committed to providing a great digital reading experience to our customers, we are exploring all opportunities to reduce costs.
With Nook sales plummeting 33%, giving the book store a $52 million dollar loss for the quarter, they felt this was the best option. It does however, leave customers very little time to place their Nook content elsewhere.
