reader.ly

A stunning display of the latest in video and brochure folding technology

Okay, so the TV is old and boxy, the wire visible and trailing off the table, and its only resemblance to the “stunning” retail displays promised at launch is that it is set up inside a Barnes & Noble. But it means, I believe, that my local B&N ranks as a high-volume store, so it should have demo units by the end of the month. In fact, and this is now the third time I’ve checked, the clerk last week told me to come back on November 20 to test drive. And then she offered to turn on the video, which I regretted, because then I was stuck there watching the most boring product video ever. If you thought the Kindle ads were blah, go into your nearest B&N and watch the nook infomercial. Midwestern-bred politeness kept me from leaving until she bent down behind the counter to shelve some books, and then I made my escape.

Given what I’ve learned about the nook’s sharing feature, however, I am glad I didn’t bother to go ahead and pre-order the nook sight unseen. A MobileRead member pressed B&N’s online support for details on the sharing feature, and found out that you can only loan a nook book out once (via Kindlerama). While your book is out on loan, you can’t read it; the borrower has 14 days to read it, after which it’s removed from her B&N reader device, and sharing is disabled from that title in your collection. Forever.

Calling this experience “sharing” seems overly generous. “Limited one-time lending” might be more accurate. The worst part in my opinion isn’t the 14-day limit, which, benevolently interpreted, could be Barnes & Noble’s way of encouraging us to become faster readers. It’s that once you lend a book to someone, you can never share it with anyone again. Imagine you are the owner of a nook and you buy a highly-anticipated book, say Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. Your friends beg you to share it with them. Do you play favorites? Send it to the most politically conservative one of the bunch because the views expressed will validate her own, or pick the one who can’t wait to rip it apart for her liberal Facebook friends?

I understand publishers are worried about the sales cannibalization that would occur if nookers were to endlessly recycle their eBooks among friends. But if you assume the worst in everyone and establish business practices accordingly, you end up with senseless policies that ultimately harm your relationships with your customers. There’s little real risk in nook owners starting a book-lending racket. People who want to read a book will not wait for months while everyone else ahead of them on the list gets a chance to read it first. Or if they do, they’ll spend that time stewing about why they’re not higher on the list and eventually refuse the loan anyway out of spite. And realistically, who is going to keep asking a nook-owning friend to share books with him? At some point, that friend is going to get fed up and tell him to buy the books himself or go to the library like the rest of us.