Barnes & Noble to close Nook App store, Nook Video, and UK Nook Store March 15
Nate Hoffelder / The Digital Reader :
Context & Ripple Effects
Barnes & Noble's retreat from three Nook services at once is the latest step in a long unwind. Holiday sales of Nook hardware and accessories had already dropped 67.9% year-over-year by early 2015 (Nook holiday sales fell 67.9%), and the company has since explored strategic alternatives including a possible sale, with chairman Leonard Riggio among the interested parties.
The timing also fits a broader shakeout in standalone e-reading businesses: subscription store Oyster shut down in late 2015 with its CEO and co-founders moving to Google Play Books (Oyster's shutdown sent its team to Google Play Books), leaving fewer independent players for Barnes & Noble to compete against on content.
First-order effects
- Nook owners in the US and UK lose access to apps, video purchases, and the UK storefront on March 15, forcing anyone who bought content there to find new homes for libraries and viewing habits.
- Barnes & Noble narrows the Nook brand down to core e-reading, cutting the operating costs of running an app marketplace and a video service that the collapsed hardware sales could no longer support.
Second-order effects
- App developers and video content partners who built for the Nook platform lose a distribution channel, pushing them toward Google Play and Apple where the remaining Nook tablet users already shop.
- Hardware partnerships like the $400 Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 Nook become harder to justify when the differentiating services behind the co-branded devices keep disappearing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, dedicated e-reading ecosystems consolidate around a handful of survivors — the same dynamic that later led Amazon to close its Kindle bookstore and Appstore in China rather than sustain thin regional operations.
- Retailers that once treated media services as a moat around device sales are learning the reverse: without device volume, every ancillary store becomes a cost center, pointing toward licensed or partner-run platforms instead of proprietary ones.
The trend: Standalone e-book and media ecosystems are consolidating fast, with second-tier players like Barnes & Noble shutting proprietary stores while Amazon and Google absorb both users and talent.