My Obsessions

The walls around Barnes & Noble‘s Nook walled garden are tumbling down.

The company’s Nook HD and Nook HD are credible content-consumption tablets — remarkably credible, actually, considering that they come from a 127-year-old bookseller. But they sold so poorly over the holiday season that it raised questions about whether B&N would end up being forced to de-emphasize its hardware business in favor of selling content on other platforms.

The Nooks use Barnes & Noble’s own custom version of Android and provide its own stores for books, magazines, newspapers and apps. And therein lies an oft-raised argument against buying a Nook: the Barnes & Noble application store has had only 10,000 pieces of software — mostly for-pay ones — vs. the hundreds of thousands of choices in Google’s Google Play.

This week #Amazon started using customer review blurbs as thumbnails for their #KindleDailyDeals. I get that it’s a way to promote its Montlake releases, but to do so for a NYTimes bestselling author is a cheap trick to try and equalize the values.

Two years after HarperCollins’ Avon Books imprint launched the digital romance imprint Impulse, its William Morrow imprint announced plans for Witness, a “digital-original” mystery, suspense and thriller line.

The e-commerce giant is planning to introduce a device this fall dedicated to streaming video over the Internet and into its customers’ living rooms, according to three people familiar with the project who aren’t authorized to discuss it.

Netflix is reaching out to all the “families” butting up against its current two-simultaneous-streams limit with a plan that shows the streaming service understands how viewers actually want to use it. It knows we want to share, and that in fact sharing can be good for Netflix too.

Netflix just announced a $12-a-month plan that doubles the current limit of two simultaneous video streams to four simultaneous feeds plan. Netflix says that the plan best serves large families that have butted up against the two simultaneous-stream limit. It also says that it expects less than one-percent of members to take advantage of the plan.

Is nothing sacred? The Kama Sutra, the world’s oldest erotic guide, has entered the 21st century with a new app that displays its myriad sex positions in 3-D, reports the Guardian.