Barnes & Noble just announced that their Nook is selling the best of any product of theirs in 40 years. On the surface, that sounds great. Just like the story that Amazon keeps telling us that their Kindle has sold more than any of its products. But what exactly is this telling us? Is it any surprise that a book reader would be selling better than any one product that a company that sells books would be selling? Think about that for a second. Barnes & Noble sells books. They’re not telling us that they’ve sold more Nooks than they’ve sold books. They’ve sold more Nooks than any particular product, which would mean specific books. So, they’ve sold more Nooks than they’ve sold of any one book by Stephen King.
Big deal. That’s really not that astonishing. Neither Barnes & Noble nor Amazon are really stretching the limits here when they tell us that their e-readers are their biggest selling item ever. I’d hope that would be the case. Or their e-readers would seriously suck.
What’s probably more significant is to think about the implications of these two announcements. Both companies, that sell books, are indicating that they now suck at selling regular copies of books. They’re much better at selling book readers. But not books. Because they’ve told us nothing about how many books they’ve sold on any of these readers. For all we know, lots of people bought e-readers and then went out and downloaded free copies of Crime and Punishment, because classics are free on e-readers. I find it highly significant that BOTH companies refuse to actually give ACTUAL numbers, but just big announcements that they’re selling more than ever. If we go with that strategy, I would like to admit that I’m boffing Playboy playmates more these days than I’ve ever boffed before in my life. The numbers are just ASTOUNDING. Yeah, that doesn’t really tell you very much, does it? Nor do I think you’re suddenly going to be hanging out my door, waiting to take pictures of all the Playboy playmates who are leaving at ungodly hours.
What’s interesting is that no one seems to be interested in telling us what’s really going on. Even Apple doesn’t tell us how it’s doing with its bookstore. Steve Jobs tells us how many iPads they’ve sold, but that doesn’t mean anything either. The iPad is used for lots of different reasons. Someone with one may NEVER buy a book for it. Again, we get no numbers of any significance, but veiled statements of “we’re doing great” and we’re dating lots of Playboy playmate supermodels.
So, I’ll leave you with this, a picture of a supermodel. Because even though I’m not dating her, and she won’t return any of my phone calls, at least you got something substantive from this post (a picture of a hot supermodel who won’t date either one of us).
We're not "officially" dating