Barnes & Noble’s Nook line of e-book readers is fairly well known. In fact, certain Nook models are thought of by many as great alternatives to products made by the likes of Sony and Amazon. Still, that hasn’t helped much in Barnes & Nobles efforts to fully take over the e-book reader world, and now it looks like the company may have to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, and formulate an attack from a different direction.
According to a news report that was published recently on the New York Times, Barnes & Noble execs are now starting to realize that it is necessary to employ a different strategy, one that involves content licensing deals instead of new hardware offerings, in order to achieve more success. An unnamed source who was quoted in the above mentioned report has reportedly said that Barnes & Noble isn’t going to fully exit the hardware business exactly. Instead, it’s going to start maximizing its expansive digital catalog from here on in.
To that end, Barnes & Noble will work on partnerships with the likes of Microsoft and Samsung, both of which would benefit from getting current Nook-exclusive content onto their own respective tablet devices. In a way, this is like a declaration that content truly is king in this day and age, and that no matter how impressive any one device’s set of hardware features is, it’s still mostly useless without the aid of great software. And that will be the focus of Barnes & Noble’s renewed efforts from now on.
