Barnes & Noble Nook Color

» see barnesandnoble.com/nook as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the nook color shipped on 16 november 2010 at $249. a seven-inch android tablet from barnes & noble with a 1024-by-600 ips display and an 800 mhz arm cortex-a8 running a customized android 2.2 froyo. it sold close to three million units in its first four months. retail discontinuation came in december 2012 when the nook hd took over the lineup. the device kept syncing to barnes & noble's servers for another decade until june 2024, when the company finally cut the cord for every nook model from 2013 and earlier.

this was barnes & noble's attempt to pivot from a struggling brick-and-mortar bookstore chain into a hardware company. it almost worked. for one quarter in early 2011 the nook color was the second-best-selling android tablet in the united states, behind the samsung galaxy tab and ahead of every other android device on the market. yves behar from fuseproject designed the angled-lower-corner industrial design that gave the nook its visual identity.

the nook color was the kind of device american e-book readers bought when they wanted something between a kindle and a tablet. nook never reached turkey. barnes & noble had no retail presence outside the us and uk, and their hardware ecosystem was structurally unavailable to anyone outside that footprint. for a turkish reader in 2010 the e-reader question stopped at the kindle, which itself was a side-channel purchase shipped through proxy addresses.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch story was promising. critics praised the color screen at a time when most e-readers were grayscale e-ink. the device could read epub files and run a stripped-down web browser that played embedded video. it was clearly a tablet wearing a reader's clothes. xda-developers had it rooted to run stock android within weeks of release, and the modding scene treated it as the cheapest decent android tablet on the market for most of 2011.

~ the unraveling ~

the cracks showed when amazon launched the kindle fire in november 2011 at $199. amazon undercut barnes & noble by fifty dollars on a device with the same general specs and a vastly larger content ecosystem behind it. barnes & noble responded with the nook tablet that same month and the nook hd in september 2012. neither moved the trajectory. by june 2014 the company had exited first-party tablet hardware after writing down hundreds of millions in nook losses. samsung-branded nooks kept the name on shelves through 2016.

~ the actual end ~

the device did not stop working in 2012. it stopped being supported. the server side kept running because barnes & noble still had accounts to honor and books to deliver. in june 2024 that finally ended. the nook color along with the rest of the 2013-and-earlier lineup lost the ability to download new content. existing books on the device remained readable. anything not yet downloaded vanished from reach.

~ what it left ~

the cyanogenmod and lineageos forks of the nook color kept the hardware useful for years after barnes & noble lost interest. by 2026 the device is mostly a curiosity, but the support story is what stands out: fourteen years of server uptime for a product the company itself stopped selling in 2012. that is longer than most cloud services last.

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