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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

This is a shame. Their Android tablets were misguided, and never likely to be competitive, but the e-ink readers were the only things really competitive with the e-ink Kindles.

I always thought if they had opened up the Android e-ink reader market more then they could have created a viable niche in reference applications, which are a surprisingly lucrative sector.

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Have you checked out Kobo's e-ink readers? From a hardware perspective, I actually prefer the Kobo Aura to my own Kindle Paperwhite 2.

I've not tried the latest ones, but the earlier ones just had a distinctly unfinished and rushed vibe to them. Kind of neat, but hacked together.

It doesn't help that I'm in the Canadian market, and for a while Kobo existed simply as an e-reader to take advantage of the fact it was more easily available here than the Kindle, so I think we were exposed to rougher versions of the initial product than elsewhere.

I've had horrible luck with Kobo: my first died after 6 months, it took 5 weeks for Kobo to get me a replacement on warranty, and the replacement died after 1 month.

I'd strongly recommend sticking with Amazon, if only for the fast replacement turn-around.

I always appreciated the nook tablets, not as readers, but as low-cost and fully featured android tablets.

Yeah, I'm not knocking the actual products they got made, just that there's no way B&N had the resources to compete with the likes of Google, Amazon and every other Android tablet manufacturer and make a decent margin. In picking their battles that wasn't a wise one to walk into.

There is still a lot of room in the e-ink market. Everybody is just afraid to enter because of patent law.

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