Amazon.com has won. Barnes & Noble (B&N) has lost. That's pretty much the only way to read the announcement earlier this week that B&N is getting out of manufacturing its Nook tablets and will instead let interested third parties make the device going forward.
"We are taking big steps to reduce the losses in the Nook segment, as we move to a partner-centric model in tablets and reduce overhead costs," said William Lynch, chief executive officer of B&N, in a statement. "We plan to continue to innovate in the single purpose black-and-white eReader category, and the underpinning of our strategy remains the same today as it has since we first entered the digital market, which is to offer customers any digital book, magazine or newspaper, on any device."
The bad news from B&N isn't all bad, however. According to a Quartz Daily Brief piece on the MSN website, B&N has a 25 percent share of the e-book business and offers significantly more books (3 million) than even Amazon (1 million+). Nook software, according to the piece, is currently available on a wide variety of devices, including Android, Apple, Blackberry and Windows. It also comes preloaded on E FUN Android Nextbook and nabi tablets.
According to PC Magazine, Microsoft may be the third-party to take over making Nook tablets. The computing giant took an 18 percent stake in Nook Media when it launched last October.
