Barnes & Noble Readouts

[Daniel]

Barnes & Noble is offering a new "Readouts" app that gives readers a free "look inside" feature. The theory is that you'll be interested in reading a taste of a new story while you are standing in line somewhere or otherwise in need of quick entertainment. It appears to be curated to some degree, and it might be fun for people who like a "mystery grab bag" experience. I'm sure the goal is to upsell you to the full version of whatever taste they deliver.

I'm not sure how the interface works, but they have video links on their promo page: B&N Readouts

Their promo page describes it as...

"Two-minute reads, for as long as you like"

"Enjoy a quick read for every moment with our free new digital discovery feature. It’s a fun, fresh way to browse – now available on NOOK® and BN.com."

"Discovery Delivered Daily - Refreshed daily with book excerpts and magazine articles in popular genres & topics, B&N Readouts is customizable by the user to deliver an addictive experience."


Would you try it? I'd probably give it a shot for a while just to see what it was like. Then I'd probably get bored after they delivered a bunch of stuff I wasn't interested in buying.

[Alan Petersen]

My Kindle TBR list is already long, so this is something that wouldn't interest me, but it's nice to see Barnes still trying to keep things going.

[Daniel]

Oct 26, 2015 17:34:08 GMT -5 Alan Petersen said:

...but it's nice to see Barnes still trying to keep things going.

Yeah, I can't decide if their new program is brilliant or idiotic. It had to cost them a bunch of money to develop it, roll it out, and advertise it. It seems to me that B&N's biggest problem is losing market share, so the real question is, will appealing to short attention spans help them regain or retain market share? It will be interesting to see.