Barnes & Noble is pressing the strategic advantage that they say their physical stores bring to sales of Nook and will roll-out 1,000-square-foot demonstration Nook boutiques across their stores, starting this summer. The NYT says the new boutiques will be adjacent to their in-store cafe’s. The company says they will take space away from their music departments to make room for the Nook nooks, and ceo William Lynch “said that the number of books on display in Barnes & Noble stores would not decrease.”
Release
Separately, Bloomberg reports that BN “filed two suits yesterday to try to fend off demands by Xerox and Alcatel-Lucent that it pay royalties for patents. The US subsidiary of Alcatel says the Nook violates seven of its patents” and Xerox claims that barnesandnoble.com violated four of their patents. “Neither claim is valid, Barnes & Noble said in its lawsuit.”
In other ereader news, Copia has officially scrapped their vaporware line of fugly first-gen and Plastic Logicish e-readers in favor of a promised line of inexpensive iPadish knockoffs and one $99 Kindle klone. Parent company svp Tony Antolino admits to the WSJ, “The iPad disrupted pricing strategy for everyone in the e-reader market, and after the price wars with Barnes and Noble and Amazon, everyone’s trying to differentiate themselves from a price-point perspective. We decided to do a revision of our hardware positioning.” The new units are promised for “fall,” though the company’s website still displays the original unreleased line.
WSJ blog