Cuppacafe

A new kind of “Nook”

OK, you tree-hugging, paperless, tech-heads, today is the day you’ve been looking forward to for some time. That’s right, kiddies, Today Barnes & Noble Inc. will begin shipping its new $259 wireless Nook electronic-book reader! According to The Wall Street Journal, the demand for these devices has been so strong that stores won’t actually have any available for sale, or for demonstration, purposes until Dec. 7.

However, Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, said that "due to high demand, we are prioritizing pre-orders so that those people who ordered before Nov. 20 will receive them for Christmas." As a result, there will be a week delay in shipping the Nook to stores.

Barnes & Noble, which unveiled its Nook on Oct. 20 to compete directly with Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-book reader as well as devices from Sony Corp. and other manufacturers, has declined to say how many Nooks have been sold or how many would be available during the Christmas period.

On Nov. 20 Barnes & Noble said that the Nook was out of stock for the holidays and that customers who ordered the Nook from that point forward wouldn't receive the device until the week of Jan. 4. The retailer earlier described the Nook as its "fastest-selling product."

My mom works at a B&N and, she tells me that folks don’t seem to care that they are not available, and have been buying them in droves.

Dawn of the Red(box) Menace!

Have you ever rented a DVD? If you are like Walt and many others, you either download them directly from the Net, or you belong to Netflix (the lees technologically adept go to Blockbuster or somesuch). Me? I go straight to the box, the Red box. You know the box I’m talking about, the one that sits just inside the door of my local supermarket.

Yep, nowadays we go directly to Redbox and get flicks for a buck. Well, according to (again) The Journal, they are like the fastes growing company in the world (not really, but even in this market they have managed to increase sales from their rental kiosks to almost $21,000 (up from about $12,000 a year ago). Which is pretty impressive.

Now while easy and cheap access to new releases might be good with you (and the profits good for the company) there are those who aren’t all that happy. To wit:

While some Hollywood studios have inked deals with the company, others see low-price Redbox as a red menace, a threat to lucrative businesses such as DVD sales and the cuts it gets of higher-priced rentals at companies like Blockbuster Inc.

Universal Pictures, Twentieth-Century Fox and Warner Bros. have tried to block Redbox's access to their new DVDs unless Redbox agreed to terms like delays for new movies. Redbox, a unit of Coinstar Inc., is firing back with lawsuits against all three studios.

I’m sure there are some more bright and shiny things to distract us this Cyber Monday that aren’t Sarah Palin, but we’ll get to them later, now we’ve got booze, er coffee to drink, and well, stuff to blow up, ah do.

Later kids!

The Perfessor

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 10:35 am and is filed under Future Flick, Movies, Techno Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.