Barnes and Noble farms out some Nook tech services
However, the bookseller says it's still committed to the e-reader.
The slow retirement of the Barnes and Noble e-reader continues. After shedding its deal with Microsoft (and closing services outside of the UK and US), the bookseller is looking to save money by outsourcing dev support and cloud services to Bahwan CyberTek -- which specializes in such things. It's pretty incredible how much money Barnes and Noble estimates it will save with the move: $13 million. However, 80 employees will lose their jobs when the company closes its offices in California and Taiwan.
Contradictory to the announcement, the company says it's still very much behind the Nook: "The company has done a significant amount of work to improve Nook's overall performance," said Fred Argir, Chief Digital Officer at Barnes and Noble. "While we have been able to reduce costs, we still have a lot more work to do to rationalize the business. We believe that by outsourcing certain technology functions of our Nook business we will further improve Nook's performance." And yet, at the same time, Amazon is so confident in next e-reader that its CEO is telling us all about it by his own volition.
