Nook Tablet 8GB official at $199, Nook Color price down to $169
Our sources were right on the money: Barnes & Noble has just announced an 8GB version of its Nook Tablet, pricing it in direct competition with the Kindle Fire at $199. The Nook Color has also been reduced in price, down to $169.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Barnes & Noble launched the Nook Tablet at $249 in November it leaned hard on one spec: 16GB of internal storage versus the Kindle Fire's 8GB, with reviewers asking whether that was enough to compete. Three months later the company has answered its own question by shipping an 8GB model at $199 — matching Amazon's price point rather than out-speccing it.
The move lands alongside a rough quarter: TechCrunch's same-day coverage of the announcement pairs it with Barnes & Noble missing Q3 estimates even as NOOK revenue grew 38% to $542M. Cutting the Nook Color — itself a bold $249 bet a year earlier — down to $169 turns the lineup into a three-rung ladder from $169 to $249, all below or at the Fire.
First-order effects
- The 16GB storage premium Barnes & Noble promoted in November is dead as a differentiator: the new 8GB Nook Tablet competes head-to-head with the Kindle Fire at $199, and existing $249 buyers paid $50 more for storage the line no longer treats as essential.
- At $169, the Nook Color becomes the entry rung of a compressed three-tier lineup ($169/$199/$249), squeezing margins across every NOOK SKU at once during a quarter the company already missed.
Second-order effects
- Amazon now faces a rival priced identically at its flagship price point, forcing the response battle onto content, services, and ecosystem lock-in rather than hardware price — the only lever left once both devices sit at $199.
- Other sub-$250 Android tablet makers get dragged into the same repricing cycle, since two heavily marketed readers-tablets now anchor the low end at $199 and $169.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the sub-$200 tablet tier converges on a single psychological price where spec differences stop mattering and the contest shifts entirely to who owns the customer's content purchases — a structural problem for any hardware-first challenger without Amazon's media catalog.
- Repeated rapid markdowns within a product generation (a $50 cut inside four months) signal that e-reader vendors are pricing defensively against each other rather than for margin, pointing toward consolidation among second-tier tablet players.
The trend: Sub-$250 tablets are collapsing toward a single $199 price floor set by the Kindle Fire, pushing competition from hardware specs into content ecosystems.