
Goodbye-Barnes-and-Noble - edward
http://keithp.com/blogs/Goodbye-Barnes-and-Noble/
======
jasode
The author's complaint was confusing to me because it didn't have enough
context.

This is a better article:

[http://www.teleread.com/drm/barnes-noble-removes-ability-
to-...](http://www.teleread.com/drm/barnes-noble-removes-ability-to-download-
its-e-books-outside-of-the-nook-ecosystem/)

The author's article didn't mention "Nook" or "Nook ecosystem" which is
crucial to inferring the motivations of B&N (and also the publishers) to
remove the Download button. Without that context, it just looks like a random
policy change that inadvertently irritated customers.

In other words, I care more about

1) the "big picture" behind removing that download button

rather than

2) the author's personal decision to stop buying ebooks from them

As a reader, I can conclude #2 from #1. But I can't figure out #1 from #2
unless I find another article such as the one I added.

~~~
Psylocyber
No surprise. The pedantic nature of your complaint is common on HN.

I found the post to be perfectly clear. Perhaps you are looking for more
information, and found it elsewhere, but it doesn't affect the quality of the
post at all.

In my day, posts like yours would be considered'trolling'. If you have
complaints with the article, communicate with the author. Why subject everyone
to your random complaints?

~~~
jasode
>If you have complaints with the article, communicate with the author.

Complaining to the author isn't necessary because he may have thought the
context was obvious -- especially to his keithp.com readers and also some HN
readers such as you.

I read HN articles every day and yet, I didn't have enough background to
connect the dots. I didn't know B&N had a download button. My amazon ebooks
account doesn't have that. I had no mental picture to understand what this
download button was about.

>Why subject everyone to your random complaints?

I took extra steps to understand why things played out the way they did to
force the author away from B&N. I thought it would be helpful to inform other
HN readers of the link I read to gain that understanding. Isn't the comments
section to be used to discuss/clarify/disagree with the article?

~~~
Zancarius
> I read HN articles every day and yet, I didn't have enough background to
> connect the dots. I didn't know B&N had a download button. My amazon ebooks
> account doesn't have that. I had no mental picture to understand what this
> download button was about.

I agree, because I've never purchased from B&N before, I didn't have that
context available either to fully appreciate the author's point. Hence why
your link was useful to me as well.

That's not to say the original article was without interest. It was, but
superficially, (to me) it seemed like a disaffected customer upset with a UI
change/removal (which is understandable).

------
cpks
It's funny, but whenever I run into weird DRM restrictions, I tend to switch
to piracy. When I had no income, I never would have bought, and while I did
pirate, no sales were lost. Now that I have income, I don't mind buying. But
if buying is sufficiently more cumbersome, I do sometimes go back to piracy.

I'd love to see a proper market study on this. As far as I can tell, all of
this is based on ego and executives' knee-jerk reactions.

~~~
notduncansmith
That's the big draw of piracy for me as well - not that I can get out of
paying for stuff, but that it's easier (by a mile) than trying to get it the
legitimate way. Example: a few weeks ago, I wanted to catch up on The Strain
before that night's episode. Went online to try to find a legitimate way to
watch it, got blocked because my cable provider (Charter) wasn't on the list
of blessed providers. Same story at Hulu. I wanted to watch it, and watch the
ads, so they could get their revenue, because that's how the economy works.
But they wouldn't let me, so I turned to PB and, after <5 minutes, had the
full episode ready to watch with 0 advertisements.

Piracy will continue until there's an easier way to acquire and own content.

~~~
pm90
Interestingly, some technologies have made me take the opposite route. Now
that I have chromecast, I find it more convenient to buy a movie on Google and
cast it rather than pirate it and watch on a laptop.

Of course, you can open the video in a chrome tab and cast that, but I've
found that's not as smooth. And nothing beats the convenience of a simple
touch :)

------
bougiefever
I like not having to make room for all of my books in my house, but when you
can't access the book you bought, that kind of makes the whole thing not work.
I have bought hundreds of ebooks, but I still am uncomfortable with not really
owning them. I de-drm my books so B&N can't just take them back (without a
refund) whenever they feel like it, but it sucks that you have to break the
rules just to have any rights to your own purchases.

On another note, I like to go to B&N to browse and just hang out. The last
time I was there, the coffee shop lady hassled me. It was a very unpleasant
experience. I heard from a friend of mine that she had the same experience.
Apparently, if they see you there and not spending enough money, they start
harassing you. Ironically, I was in the process of buying a book on my laptop
when she came by to inform me that I needed to make a purchase if I wanted to
keep using the internet there. Were they going to kick me out if I didn't buy
coffee? I was only there for my lunch break, so I never found out. I think in
the future, I'll just go to Starbucks where they still leave me in peace.

~~~
techrat
>The last time I was there, the coffee shop lady hassled me. It was a very
unpleasant experience. I heard from a friend of mine that she had the same
experience. Apparently, if they see you there and not spending enough money,
they start harassing you.

I'll take "Things that will make me spend even less money in that store" for
$800, Alex.

Between this and shuttering DRM based services after promising you can buy the
tracks you love, etc... I really have to wonder why companies haven't stopped
and asked themselves why what they are doing isn't working.

Nah, it can't be us, they'll think... so let's double down on the
restrictions, pressure selling tactics and blame the dirty pirates when our
bottom line continues to slip.

Meanwhile, those dirty pirates aren't dealing with any of this bullshit.

~~~
VLM
"those dirty pirates"

There is an interesting analogy between "dirty pirates" and teens in malls.

Pretty much everyone younger than myself has had the experience of mall
security severely hassling them as a teen or even as a young adult, pretty
much just because their rentacops have a license to be jerks. Well, here I am
a rather well paid dude with fat stacks of cash, but the mall doesn't want my
type there, so it never even appears on the radar anymore. Malls are dead to
anyone younger than perhaps 40. Not surprisingly they're generally not doing
so well financially. Lots of dead / dying malls across the country.

If a company hates their primary and future customers enough, eventually those
customers WILL go away permanently.

With B+N it might be location based or racial harassment etc because my
screaming little kids (is there any other kind?) and I shop there and they
don't mess with me. Then again I pass for a non-minority middle aged
reasonably well dressed middle class dude. I suspect that is the key to their
unwritten harassment policies.

~~~
leephillips
"the mall doesn't want my type there"

What happens when you go to the mall? What type are you? I sometimes visited
malls while under 40 and I never got hassled, so I'm curious.

~~~
VLM
What I'm getting at is perhaps 20 years ago there was hysteria about teens in
malls being disruptive / troublemakers therefore rentacops to chase them away
so the financially valuable moms and dads can shop in peace and comfort. I
knew about the crackdown so I never even bothered going to the mall as a teen.
As a young adult at lunch hour at my first real job, a business formal suit
and tie establishment, I bought some nice expensive clothes, walking thru the
mall to my car after obviously shopping at my lunch (I took off the sports
coat of my business suit) and got severely hassled by a rentacop about what
I'm doing there and where are my parents, etc. Pretty much like I heard they
treat teens except they didn't call the cops and issue a loitering ticket to
me. Never went back there again.

The long term problem with treating teens like dirt, is they eventually grow
up into adults some of which have fat stacks of cash and would make fantastic
customers, however there's no way in hell they're ever going back to that
place again.

It appears mall security was very effective there. Nothing left in there but
urbanware clothing, tennis shoes, cell phones, and really cheap jewelry left.
Its not that the neighborhood has done downhill, can't count how many million
dollar condos within a mile.

------
Supermighty
Barnes & Noble is missing the biggest opportunity in ebook sales. They do
little to nothing to show the ebook value to shoppers visiting the store with
the purpose of buying a book.

The physical store has limited space for books, so they only have the newest
and most popular. BN needs to stock the self with paper leaflets of 2nd and
3rd tier books that could be bought in the online store. The leaflet could
contain a QR code so shoppers could buy the book right then using their phone.

This would expose more people to the online ebook store and draw them into
titles that BN can't stock physically. They could even give them a "free"
first book to incentivize people into signing up. Educate the staff to help
non-technical shoppers sign-up and get their book.

The overall experience would be to teach people how to use the nook app to buy
books. Once people are comfortable with the process they will be apt to buy
more books through the app.

~~~
ctdonath
Contrast Amazon's standard bonus of giving you .MP3s of an album if you buy
the CD, and the growing number of movies sold as DVD/BD _and_ digital bundle.
Fond of both the convenience of digital media and the objective ownership of
physical media, one of the minor but real hinderances I've had in buying books
is having to choose the medium - let me pay a buck or two more and get both
formats.

------
obviouslygreen
Sort of tangential, but my first job was working in a Barnes & Noble, and it's
still the one I miss the most. More than that, while I do believe electronic
distribution is both more ecologically rational and practically efficient, I'm
one of those people who was raised on physical books as an avid reader... and
there really is something very significant lost without that tactile
experience.

I suppose it's positive that more and more people will grow up without that,
so we can cut down on the number of trees we cut down, but it's still sad in a
way to see that experience going away. The feel (and even sound and smell, in
some cases) of a book can be very intimate.

~~~
ravitation
For me the tactile experience is incredibly important, especially as a
software engineer that stares at a screen most of the day. Experiencing an
object on more than just one level is something I think we've lost a lot of.
Reading a substantial book electronically has almost no appeal to me and I
love to read.

~~~
hypertexthero
People learn in different ways, and I remember reading, perhaps in [Pragmatic
Thinking and Learning]([https://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-
and-learn...](https://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-
learning)), that your tactile sense is as important for learning as your
visual and aural senses, and so on.

I like the smell of books, too.

~~~
acjohnson55
I doubt tactility (from a learning perspective) really comes into play while
reading a book, as opposed to on a screen. That's not to denigrate paper book
reading as an enjoyable experience, but let's not go overboard :)

~~~
nirvdrum
For me it's a matter of quickly referencing material. For whatever reason, I
seem to recall where things are roughly by the thickness of the stack of
pages. The percentage bar on the Kindle doesn't replicate that. And flipping
between pages on a device just takes too long. So, I have a hard time reading
any sort of reference material on a Kindle.

~~~
icebraining
Why not search for some keyword?

~~~
nirvdrum
It's never as fast and document search on e-readers seems to be straight word
match rather than any form of intelligent indexing. If I don't recall where
something is, it's almost always faster to use the book's index than it is to
naively search through the doc, in my experience.

------
ansible
I've been restricting what stores I purchase ebooks from because of DRM.
Fiction from Baen and Dragonmount, CS from O'Reilly, etc.. I've been thinking
of building a book scanner to make my physical collection more portable.

Interestingly, I have no problem buying games on Steam, though many are via
GOG and Humble, where I can still download a copy too.

~~~
lucaspiller
Bear in mind not all Steam games come with DRM. It is required for things like
the Steam marketplace though, which can often add a lot to the game.

Kerbal Space Program was quite reluctant to launch on Steam as they didn't
want to add the DRM, once they found it wasn't required (or Steam relaxed the
rules) they did so and now sell it there and on their own store.

------
higherpurpose
> After I got home, I had to figure out how to get Adobe Digital Editions
> installed on my laptop

Don't.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/adobe-spyware-
reveals-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/adobe-spyware-reveals-
again-price-drm-your-privacy-and-security)

I recommend using Google's Play Books, which you can read on your PC from this
link, after you upload them (preferably epubs):

[https://play.google.com/books](https://play.google.com/books)

I actually prefer it, too. It looks nicer, and you can sync them with your
Android devices, too.

------
mnw21cam
I'm a little confused - if you purchase an ebook, but aren't allowed to
download it, how are you meant to read it?

~~~
gioele
You are meant to use one of their sanctioned devices. Those devices connect to
their servers, do some arcane handshake and receive a copy of the book.

~~~
72deluxe
That's insane. You might as well buy real books! That's just as arcane

------
airmondii
I haven't purchased ebooks through Barnes and Noble, but I understand how
annoying it can be getting all the ebook stores/ecosystems/formats/devices to
play nice with each other. It was the reason I continued to buy paper books up
until recently.

My solution: buy your ebook in any store that allows downloads (Amazon,
Google, Kobo), and import into Calibre. Change settings to automatically
convert imported ebooks to .epub format if they aren't already (the DRM-
stripping plugin is optional ;-)). Set your library folder to dropbox, and
voila, you have unfettered access from anywhere (and transferring to your Kobo
Aura is easy too).

~~~
rikkus
This is exactly what I've been doing and it works fine for me. Like you, I
just buy from wherever sells.

By stopping downloads, they're obviously trying to stop piracy, but if other
companies follow suit, surely there will be technical solution found sooner or
later. Maybe they're just trying to do as much as they can.

Perhaps they don't know that those of us who download and strip DRM aren't
necessarily pirates - just looking after own own (legally purchased) books in
a system that we prefer?

~~~
airmondii
As long as there are multiple sources where you can download your paid-for
ebook, this decision by B&N will accomplish nothing, other than killing
potential sales to people like us.

I don't mind paying $10 for an ebook. I just want a good user experience. This
means no DRM and full control of the content.

------
anotherevan
Remember, when you pay money for ebooks with DRM, you are only leasing them,
not buying them.

[https://twitter.com/evmcl/status/261661956681908225/photo/1](https://twitter.com/evmcl/status/261661956681908225/photo/1)

[http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-
drm/](http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/)

[http://the-digital-reader.com/2012/10/23/kobo-says-youre-no-...](http://the-
digital-reader.com/2012/10/23/kobo-says-youre-no-longer-allowed-to-share-your-
account-not-with-a-spouse-your-kids-anyone/#.VFFysX8sVcM)

[https://twitter.com/librarythingtim/status/14262859728958259...](https://twitter.com/librarythingtim/status/142628597289582593)

------
phkahler
In the end we shall have: Walled gardens - kindle, nook, etc... Regular
Printed books Free stuff

The free stuff will consist of: Books with expired copyright - Project
Gutenberg Books that authors decided to give away for various reasons Illegal
copies of stuff

The illegal copies are the reason for the walled gardens of course. This
unfortunately doesn't help the blogger who wants to transfer his stuff to
different devices, but that's the problem with DRM.

Anyone selling non-DRM books is likely not to be as profitable, will not get
big names in their catalog, and will either fail or stay second rate.

Meanwhile, B&N stores are full of people. IMHO they would have to screw up
badly to go out of business in the next few years. ebooks just aren't that
great from a business perspective.

------
dammitcoetzee
The thing that kills me about Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Borders, etc.
is how they are slowly expanding the toy section of the stores. It's pretty
much gotten to the point where they are stocking so few books I want, there is
no point in making the trip. I would go in hopes of getting the book now
instead of waiting a couple days for shipping.

Every-time they said, "Sorry sir, we don't have that book in stock, but we can
order it for you" I would excuse myself from the conversation, load up the
amazon app while walking, and have it ordered before I had my car door open.

------
orclev
Open Letter to B&N - [http://tenletters.org/](http://tenletters.org/)

So, I wrote this open letter to B&N about a 2 weeks ago and just haven't
gotten around to posting it yet. I was waiting until I managed to track down
the e-mail addresses of some of the big wigs, but since this seems relevant
I'll post it here as well. Once I've gotten the e-mails out to B&N I'm going
to submit this on here as well as a couple other places.

~~~
chrisBob
I made it through almost three paragraphs of that. I expect your target
audience will make it through much less. You may want to condense this before
you send it out.

~~~
tormeh
The nice phrase for tl;dr is "executive summary" because big wigs don't need
to bother with ill-written text.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
All DRM is evil. If I meet any resistance through legitimate routes, I'll turn
to piracy in a heartbeat. The digital media industry needs to get their shit
together.

------
Rudism
I have a Kindle Paperwhite (gen 1) but have been itching to get out from under
Amazon's thumb. I hear a lot about the Kobo devices. Are there any alternate
e-ink readers that aren't tied to a particular ecosystem? I would love a
simple device that's just a reader supporting the common formats without
network connectivity, online stores, or any of that other cruft.

------
robk
You can pull the books off the SD card on an Android phone running the Nook
app. That's how I've been doing it since they disabled downloads. Quite
annoying though. I used to price shop between them and Amazon, but now I lean
towards just buying direct from Amazon unless there's a very large price
differential.

------
andrewpk
Considering I cannot download copies of my iBooks purchases via the web, a
more valid complaint (in my opinion) would be that you need a valid form of
payment on file with B&N before you can re-download already purchased items.

There's some real nonsense.

------
annamarie
B&N is embedded in all the college bookstores and has solid pipelines there. I
think right now their ebook focus is on developing their e-textbook rental
program.

They've got an edge there that Amazon can't hit too hard.

------
blakeja
This whole subject is a source of never ending amusement to me. I am a book
lover and still read paper books and each year that goes by I feel
increasingly like some kind of rebel.

