Barnes & Noble to Build Nook With Samsung

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Barnes & Noble Inc.’s (NYSE: BKS) Nook could begin a resurrection after years of poundings by Amazon.com | AMZN Price Prediction Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle and the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad. The deeply trouble book retailer will produce co-branded Nook models with Samsung, which has offered its own challenges to the iPad. The recovery pits Barnes & Noble against companies with much greater marketing capacity, larger balance sheet power and huge earnings.

The two companies announced:

[A] partnership to develop co-branded Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 NOOK tablets that feature the award-winning Barnes & Noble digital reading experience.

The co-branded devices will combine popular Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 hardware with customized NOOK software to give customers powerful, full-featured tablets that are designed for reading, with easy access to Barnes & Noble’s expansive digital collection of more than three million books, leading magazines and newspapers.

The companies are expected to introduce Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 NOOK in a 7-inch version in the U.S. in early August. The co-branded tablets will be prominently displayed along with NOOK eReaders and sold at Barnes & Noble’s nearly 700 bookstores across the U.S. and online at bn.com, one of the leading e-commerce sites.

Barnes & Noble has to boast about sales of a product that never caught on well. Amazon has used its customer base and brand power to introduce version after version of the Kindle, which has evolved from a simple e-reader into a powerful tablet, and one of the few challengers to the iPad. The Kindle comes with multiple screen sizes. And Amazon uses the Kindle as a portal to its massive bookstore and premium video service. Barnes & Noble may have a large e-book library based on titles. However, it cannot match Amazon’s movie and premium television service.

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Clearly Apple already holds the largest share of the tablet market, which makes it nearly impossible for new tablets to gain market share.

The Nook had so little success in its previous incarnations that the odds against the Samsung version are extremely high.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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