Amidst poor sales and an uncertain future, Barnes & Noble has announced that it will give away the Nook Simple Touch e-reader for free to anybody who buys a Nook HD+ tablet, for a limited time. Reuters reports that next week, anyone who buys the $269 Nook HD+ will receive a Simple Touch as well. The Simple Touch normally sells for $79 after a December price drop; we haven’t yet seen the deal go live on Barnes & Noble’s site, though the Nook HD+ currently comes with a $50 store credit.
Barnes & Noble giving Nook Simple Touch away free with Nook HD+ after holiday slump
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Barnes & Noble reported a disastrous 26 percent year-over-year drop in Nook sales this holiday, and this announcement suggests that it’s trying to offload some of the e-readers and tablet inventory it had hoped to sell. Barnes & Noble has touted the value of bundling E Ink and LCD products before, but this fire-sale pricing could also be part of its recently announced plan to reevaluate tablet and e-reader strategies. While the company has refuted rumors that it’s losing interest in hardware production, it has suggested that people are more interested in tablets like the Nook HD+ than in single-use devices. The Nook Simple Touch, meanwhile, isn’t its newest e-reader: the Simple Touch with Glowlight succeeded it in April of last year.
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