Barnes & Noble doesn't provide any sales figures to back its claims

Dec 1, 2011 16:07 GMT  ·  By

During the company’s second quarter earnings announcement, Barnes & Noble revealed that its recently launched 7-inch Nook Tablet powered by the Android OS has become the fastest selling Nook in the company’s history.

Barnes & Noble hasn’t provided any figures to back up this claim, but it did say that its Nook business, including sales of digital content, device hardware and related accessories, increased 85% in the second quarter to $220 million, on a comparable sales basis.

“The launch of Nook Tablet, combined with the product enhancements to Nook Color and $99 Nook Simple Touch, represents the highest-quality portfolio of digital reading products on the market at incredible values,” said William Lynch, chief executive officer of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

“We expect to sell millions of devices during our third quarter, adding to the millions of current Nook customers.

“This growing base of customers buying digital content from Barnes & Noble will continue to position us as one of the fastest growing companies in this exploding digital content market, and we project this will generate significant returns on our investments for years to come,” concluded the company’s rep.

The Nook Tablet was made official in mid-November and it looks remarkably similar with the previous Nook Color as the two share the same chassis and 7-inch VividView IPS color touchpanel with a 1024 x 600 screen resolution.

On the inside however, B&N has brought a lot of changes to its new device which drops the 800MHz single-core TI OMAP 3621 processor of its predecessor for a 1.2GHz dual-core OMAP4 SoC seconded by 1GB of memory, while also doubling the amount of storage space installed to 16GB.

Pricing is set at $249 (180 EUR) in the US, which makes it $50 (36 EUR) more expensive than its nearest rival, the Amazon Kindle Fire.