The revamped Nook lineup

Today B&N announced a lower-cost version of its Nook Tablet, the “reader’s tablet” with a 7″ color LCD screen, which I’ve discussed before here. This new version matches Amazon’s Kindle Fire pretty much spec-for-spec and dollar-for-dollar by reducing the price to just $199. It also reduced the memory to match the Kindle Fire, now with 8 GB of internal storage (instead of 16 GB for the $249 Nook Tablet version) and 512 MB of RAM (instead of 1 GB for the $249 version).

A quick re-cap of the specs of both Nook Tablet versions (different specs in italics):

Nook Tablet:

• $249
• 7″ VividView IPS LCD touchscreen display with 1024 x 600 resolution
• 1 GHz dual-core processor
• 1 GB of RAM
• 16 GB of internal storage (plus SD card slot)
• 14.1 oz
• battery life: 11.5 hours reading / 9 hours video

Nook Tablet “Lite”:

• $199
• 7″ VividView IPS LCD touchscreen display with 1024 x 600 resolution
• 1 GHz dual-core processor
• 512 MB of RAM
• 8 GB of internal storage (plus SD card slot)
• 14.1 oz
• battery life: 11.5 hours reading / 9 hours video

Probably a good move on B&N’s part to match the sub-$200 price of the Kindle Fire competition — I think many people would rather save $50 as a trade-off for the slightly reduced specs.

B&N also still offers the older-generation Nook Color (lowering the price by $30, to $169) and the e-Ink-based Nook Simple Touch (for $99).

November e-book sales increased slightly from October, to $77.3M, but continued the meandering range that may signal a plateau, or at least a noticeable slowing, of the heretofore-explosive growth of e-book sales. While sales were still up 65.9% from November 2010, that rate marks the slowest increase of the year (and last month’s 81.2% growth rate clocks in as the second-slowest of 2011).

November 2011 e-book sales at $77.3M

Various observers have attributed the slowdown in e-book sales growth to customers waiting until the holiday season to buy new e-readers (note that the Kindle 4 and Kindle Fire were announced September 28, 2011 but didn’t ship until November 21), or to Amazon’s inclusion of Kindle e-books in library lending programs, which began in late September.

At an 11-month total of $871.7M (or $885M or so with the more recent, slightly upwardly revised numbers), it would take a great December to hit the $1 billion mark for e-books that I predicted at the start of the year — but they will probably get pretty darn close.

The recap of the past 13 months of e-book sales:

One other interesting note: the Publisher’s Weekly press release noted that sales of adult mass-market paperbacks “all but died,” coming in at only $20.8M, less than half the figure from the previous year. This is not too surprising, since the growth of e-books is most likely to impact sales of mass-market paperbacks, as MMPs are the least expensive print offering, their release is delayed after hardcovers (as some publishers do with e-books), and most closely filled the role that e-books are starting to fill for people: day-to-day fiction reading, as opposed to hardcover cookbooks, graphic books, or bookshelf display items.

While up 81.2% over October 2010, e-book sales came in at a slightly disappointing $72.8M in October 2011. Publisher’s Weekly reports the total for the first 10 months of 2011 at $807.7M, up 131.1% from the same months in 2010. However, they do point out that October is the first month in 2011 that e-book sales (up only 81.2%) did not double from the previous year.

October 2011 E-Book Sales are $72.8M

This is the second month in a row that e-books have slowed their pace. In fact, the entire year of 2011 has been fairly steady (compare January 2011’s $69.9M with October’s $72.8M). In fact, the average monthly sales so far in 2010 were $79.4M ($80.8M if you use PW’s updated totals), so October is a below-average month for the year. We’ll see if the holiday shopping season (which has traditionally caused a nice surge as people get e-readers for Xmas) bumps those figures up in December 2011 and January 2012.

The last 13 months of sales figures:

On a personal note, I apologize for the lack of regular posts — my job has been taking up all of my time, and I just haven’t had the time I’d like to devote to blogging (let alone novel-writing!).