Report: Microsoft Wants to Buy Nook for $1 Billion

TechCrunch is reporting that Microsoft, which has already made an interesting $300 million investment in Nook, wants to double down and buy the whole darn thing. Specifically, Microsoft wants to pay $1 billion to acquire the digital assets of Nook Media LLC—that would be the separate Nook company that spun off from Barnes & Noble last year. Microsoft wants its own Kindle (or iBooks) store.

TechCrunch explains the internal documents that show that Microsoft is interested in the e-reader ecosystem that is not named Kindle (which continues Redmond's trend of being the search engine not named Google, the phone not named iPhone or Android, etc.):

In this plan, Microsoft would redeem preferred units in Nook Media, which also includes a college textbook division, leaving it with the digital operation — e-books, as well as Nook e-readers and tablets.

So Nooks will continue to exist. But not all of them. The internal documents show that Nook is planning to discontinue the Android-based tablet business by the end of its 2014 fiscal year and push Nook content to a 'third party partner'. I guess that 'third party partner' would have been Microsoft? Or other Android tablets too? Who knows. The internal documents do not show Nook planning to discontinue the Nook e-readers, however. [TechCrunch]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/report-microsoft-wants-to-buy-nook-for-1-billion-497367267

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