A couple of months ago, bookseller Barnes & Noble announced it would seek a third party partner to design and build new versions of its color Nook tablets. Now Barnes & Noble has reconsidered that idea and announced it will continue to design the Nook in-house.
Today's announcement, as part of Barnes & Noble's quarterly financial results, comes after the company's CEO William Lynch resigned in July, with Michael Huseby taking on the title of president of Barnes & Noble afterward. In a press release, Huseby said, "The company intends to continue to design and develop cutting-edge NOOK black and white and color devices."
He expanded on that statement in a conference call with analysts, saying, "Some kind of wholesale outsourcing of our color device business is neither appropriate nor is it smart for the company." Huseby added that the designs of the Nook tablets are not the problem and defended their device team, saying, "... they don't deserve to have their jobs outsourced to somebody else."
Barnes & Noble plans to release "at least" one new Nook product sometime before the end of 2013, and advises that more hardware products are in development. In today's reveal of the company's last quarterly financial numbers, their Nook business brought in $153 million in revenue, down 20.3 percent from the same period a year ago.
In April 2012, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft announced a partnership that got Microsoft to invest $300 million in the Nook division. Barnes & Noble did not comment on the current state of that partnership, with company executives saying only that the deal with Microsoft was supposed to help expand the Nook's digital content internationally and that those plans were still in place.
Source: Barnes & Noble | Image via Barnes & Noble
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