B&N doesn't have the operational chops that Amazon does. Its going to take more than Brick & Mortar to make a dent in the tablet market. B&N will fight with Dell for table scraps while Amazon and Apple each capture sizeable, material share. I wrote a bit about why I think Amazon is going to kill this on my blog earlier today - http://www.byte.org/2011/09/28/amazon-coming-into-its-own/ - tl;dr: Amazon is one of the few tech companies with the ops and distribution chops in the same league as Apple.
How true. I had to buy a heap of textbooks recently, and had a discount coupon for B&N, so I decided to give them a try instead of just buying from Amazon as I had originally intended.
Bad idea. I saved about $75, but had to deal with billing errors, cancellation of part of my order, slow and overpriced shipping, and that cost me several hours of my valuable time. I was astonished at how poor the experience was.
I buy as much as I can on Amazon now - with Prime it is a no-brainer...
This is after wondering why I could order books from Amazon and they arrived 9am the next day (the joys of living in a teeny country like the UK :P) but when I ordered X other thing from different sites it took days, and was full of mistakes.
Amazon have absolutely nailed the shipping side of online retail - which is usually what people most complain about in retailers, after all!
