eBooks, News January 9, 2012

Barnes And Noble Offers Free And Reduced NOOKS With Subscriptions!

Big news from B&N today! They’re looking to push down the price of the NOOK and drive more subscription services, so they’ve combined the two! You can get a free NOOK Simple Touch or a $99 NOOKcolor with a subscription to the New York Times through B&N ($19.99/month). Alternately, if you are more of the entertainment news type, there’s always a $199 NOOK Tablet with a subscription to People!

This is potentially huge for the ebook industry. It turns the reader hardware into a commodity, not the main show. It also pushes prices down while also lining up ongoing cash flow for B&N and the periodical providers (who I assume are splitting the subsidy costs). Finally, this is a much more dramatic price cut and incentive than Kindles with Special Offers or ad-based Kobo devices. If you read the NY Times, you can effectively get a free NOOK and still get free online access to the NYT plus an ereader version. That’s a great deal, and one that is going to have Amazon scrambling to respond.

Of course, some of this is probably due to B&N’s NOOK Simple Touch sales miss…but this should move a fair number of them! It will be interesting to see where the market goes from here, but “free ereader with one-year subscription” veers awfully close to “free phone with two year contract”. How long until a 2-year NYT subscription yields you a free tablet?

You can check out all the details and pick up your free NOOK at nook.com/nyt. The offer runs officially through March 9, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it continues for longer if it is a success!

Tags: Barnes and Noble NOOK, Books and eBooks

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About Carly Z

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Carly has been a gadget fiend for a long time, going back to her first PDA (a Palm M100). She quickly went from researching what PDA to buy to following tech news closely and keeping up with the latest and greatest stuff. She loves writing about ebooks because they combine her two favorite activities; reading anything and everything, and talking about fun new tech toys. What could be better?

Peter

The concept is interesting if you read one of those publications. If you don’t, it’s not a good deal at all. Maybe if it were expanded to other offerings it would be worth considering. I really like my Nook Color (despite some quirks from it being a refurb) and would consider subscriptions to lower the price for a Tablet, but they’d have to be subscriptions of interest and my preferred titles would likely not lead to huge discounts.
- http://www.geardiary.com Carly Z
  
  What intrigues me is if they get more periodicals on board. Obviously the NYT and People are specific areas of interest, but if they can expand it to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, etc., that can send serious ripples.
  And the NYT and People are big enough names that they’ll definitely capture some interest, and probably enough to see if this is worth pursuing further.
  Interesting times…