When comparing Barnes & Noble NOOK Books vs eBooks.com, the Slant community recommends eBooks.com for most people. In the question“What are the best eBook stores?” eBooks.com is ranked 3rd while Barnes & Noble NOOK Books is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose eBooks.com is:
eBooks.com offers academic eBooks on their store that are claimed to be from the world's leading scholarly and academic book publishers.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Send eBooks as gift
The NOOK store allows users to send eBooks as gifts to their friends and family.
Pro NOOK app
B&N offers a NOOK app for Android, iOS and Windows 8 in their respective stores. This allows user to shop and read their eBooks natively on those operating systems.
Pro Self publishing
B&N offers a way for users to self publish their eBooks to the NOOK eBook store, the service is called NOOK Press.
Pro Academic books
eBooks.com offers academic eBooks on their store that are claimed to be from the world's leading scholarly and academic book publishers.
Pro Free excerpts
eBooks.com offers free excerpts for their more popular eBooks. This way users can get a feel on how the title reads and what it's structure looks like.
Pro Very intuitive site
The site is very easy to understand and navigate.
Pro Send gift certificates
eBooks.com allows for users to purchase gift certificates online worth 10-100 dollars and will then e-mail said certificate to an e-mail address of the purchases choosing along with a customized message.
Cons
Con Uses a special DRM on their eBooks, any eBook purchased from B&N is not Adobe Digital Edition compliant
While B&N does use and read .epub on their devices, any eBook purchased from the B&N eBook store will not be able to be used in other .epub readers unless the DRM is stripped from said eBook.
Con No legacy Windows app or Mac app
While B&N use to offer a PC and Mac app for the desktop, they pulled support officially in 2013.
Con Higher prices then competition
Part of the reason B&N is having so much trouble with the NOOK brand currently and most likely part of its decision to separate itself from it by spinning it into its own company is that since the demolishing of agency pricing they are unable to compete on prices.
Con B&N not confident in NOOK brand
B&N will be spinning its NOOK division into a separate company, which does not show much faith in their own brand. What's worse is that this show of uncertainty of wanting to separate from the failing device and it's eBook store will only just further distance the customers from the NOOK. Being that their eBooks have a special DRM scheme that does not allow their .epubs to work in other device, current users better hope this new company does not fold or they will be out of their entire NOOK eBook library.
Con Store feels cluttered and unintuitve
The landing page for eBooks.com feels a bit cluttered and can be confusing to navigate to the users desired section.