PC Magazine
Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color e-reader has driven more than half a million newspaper and magazine sales since being launched in October, according to the company.
According to Leslie Horn, since the touch-enabled e-reader was introduced, its associated newsstand has generated 650,000 single copy or subscription sales, among 120 newspaper and magazine brands. Barnes & Noble reports that more transactions have taken place in the past month than in the entire preceding year.
Horn suggests that part of the success so far may be the availability of a subscription mechanism, something so far missing from the iPad:
“Through Nook Newsstand, yearly subscriptions to monthly magazines are about $15. On the iPad, most magazines cost about $4.99 per issue. But as far as iPad subscriptions go, the consensus is that they’ll be available, but no one knows when.”
The Nook Newsstand is available for the Nook e-reader, Android and iOS devices, and desktop computers. It is not clear how many of the reported sales originated on the Nook Color as opposed to the other supported devices.
Barnes & Noble did not provide specific numbers for individual publications or a breakdown between subscription and single-copy sales. If those sales were applied equally over four months — which almost certainly is not the case — that would amount to about 1,300 sales per title each month.
