Barnes & Noble is shutting down its Nook app store, the slightly niche portal through which it sold ebooks for its e-reader, the Nook.
I bought my Nook in a panic, when I was on my way to interview someone whose book would otherwise have taken six weeks to arrive. I viewed it as I do contactless payment and automatic windscreen wipers, with the reverence of the digital-latecomer, pathetically grateful and astonished, like the tribespeople confronted with a telly in The Gods Must Be Crazy. I hadn’t even processed at the time that I had all the boon of a Kindle with none of the tax avoidance of Amazon; indeed, I didn’t even realise it was serviced by Barnes and Noble. There were some glitches – when I tried to buy p*rnland by the anti-p*rnography campaigner Gail Dines, it repeatedly gave me Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot instead. I decided in the end that there was no dark conspiracy behind this; if someone were deliberately making mischief, they would have replaced it with some actual p*rn, right? That’s what situationist pranks are for.
Long after its immediate usefulness, it continued to amaze me. It was only 60 quid and I could check emails and Twitter, use apps, buy games: there was a lovely app where you could make your kids read to you and then you’d have a recording of them mispronouncing “emperor” and asking what naked meant.
Then the next generation came out; it was somewhat smaller and did almost nothing. All it could do was download books. This was an epic vexation since I’d bought one for my daughter, and in the end had to swap hers with my original, effectively giving her a secondhand e-reader for Christmas, like Tiny Tim. Then I couldn’t separate our two accounts, so mine was full of Minecraft primers and hers was full of Eva Fraser’s Facial Workout, and it all got too embarrassing and I realised that libraries were quite a personal thing and you really couldn’t share them across families, let alone generations.
I wouldn’t say – p*rnland and the steady deterioration of the product aside – that the fault for the failure is with Barnes & Noble, especially. It is just in the nature of the internet: you are either the person everyone has heard of or nobody has heard of you.
