Friday, December 25, 2009

Barnes & Noble Failing the Nook?

Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader is tiny!Image by Todd Barnard via Flickr
Nook was a surprising hit, got some trouble with the pre-order bulk, and B&N was able to ship as much Nook as they can to waiting customers. However since they were able to send out quite a lot of these orders (some reports saying 60,000), something happened--a domino effect if you think about it. After receiving their Nook, what would the customers usually do? Yes, they will immediately download e-books. And when tens of thousands of customers download e-books at the same time, a queuing problem emerges.


Judging by customer feedback on its support forums, it appears a glut of download requests over gift-giving day jammed the B&N net pipes and left a great many disappointed Nook users. All attempts at downloading an ebook yesterday -- even by those who got their Nook a little earlier in the month -- were greeted with a "Queued: Will complete shortly" message, which apparently remained that way until early this morning when downloading finally resumed functioning.

I guess the people at Barnes & Noble were totally unprepared at how to supply and strategise the implementation of the Nook. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people who are still in the queue are fuming mad at Barnes & Noble, but this for me this is part of the birthing pains of a new product. Hopefully their customer service personnel is able to handle the situation and the product and supply team be able to cope up with all these hassles.

With all the trouble the Nook had to go through, this gadget better be worth it.

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