Barnes & Noble cuts prices across its Nook lineup, vies for your budget tablet affection
In what could be seen as a response to the positive reaction that Google's $200 Nexus 7 has garnered, Barnes & Noble has just cut down the prices on all three of its Android-based, seven-inch Nook Tablets.
Context & Ripple Effects
Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook Tablet at $249 in 2011, then broadened its lower-cost offer with an $199 8GB Nook Tablet and a $169 Nook Color in February 2012. The latest reductions extend that price-led positioning across the seven-inch range.
The cuts put Barnes & Noble's Android hardware into a sharper value comparison with Google's $200 Nexus 7, whose reception is identified as the immediate competitive backdrop.
First-order effects
- Nook shoppers face lower prices across all three seven-inch models, while Barnes & Noble gives up unit revenue to improve the lineup's budget-tablet appeal.
- Google's $200 Nexus 7 becomes a more explicit reference price for Barnes & Noble's Nook range.
Second-order effects
- The comparison shifts Android tablet competition toward entry price and model differentiation, rather than leaving Barnes & Noble to sell against its own earlier $249 Nook Tablet positioning.
- Barnes & Noble's lower-priced 8GB model gains greater importance as a way to keep price-sensitive buyers within the Nook lineup rather than moving to Google's alternative.
Third-order effects
- The sequence from the 2011 $249 Nook Tablet launch to February's lower-cost configuration and this lineup-wide reduction points to a budget-tablet market in which vendors use increasingly fine price tiers to defend demand.
- If that pattern holds, seven-inch Android devices will be differentiated less by a single flagship price and more by how effectively each vendor ladders features and storage around a low entry point.
The trend: Seven-inch Android tablets are becoming a price-segmented category, with the $200 tier acting as a key competitive anchor.