Microsoft makes bid to buy out Nook

With a simple lead line yesterday, Media Bistro dropped what I consider a serious potential bomb onto the publishing landscape:

"Microsoft is considering offering Barnes & Noble $1 billion to buyout the Nook Media business"

First of all, $1 billion dollars? Wow. This is not even the #1 eBook reader or publishing platform and it's warranting that kind of an offer. But it's less awe-inspiring when you consider that Microsoft already owns a 16.8 percent stake in Nook Media, and when you know that Microsoft has been working with Barnes & Noble for more than a year-- and especially when you know that Nook Media has decided to discontinue its own Nook tablet at the end of fiscal 2014.

Add those developments up, and it only makes sense that Microsoft, still one of the top technology companies in the world, would want to own and operate a part of the eBook publishing industry, one of the fastest growing industries around.

My mind reels with the possibilities and here's why:

1. Industry Shakeup

If Microsoft were to own Nook Media, they would have the money and platform to start a new attack on the dominance of Amazon. While Barnes & Noble is no slouch of a company, they are a brick & mortar retail company that expanded into eBooks and technology when they needed to. 

Compare that to Amazon, a web retail company that expanded into books because it was good business, and Apple, a hardware/software company keen on design that expanded into books because its a great kind of media for the devices they create. 

Amazon is good at selling books. Apple is good at making eBooks beautiful. And they are both doing a great job of their respective strengths.

But the single biggest challenge of the eBook world is eBook publishing. It's not intuitive and it's clunky to do. It can be infuriating. There is an entire business built up around doing the formatting and publishing and distributing because it's such a challenging process. The simple fact that Microsoft is a software company, and mostly for businesses, means that this could be the way for a large eBook media company to be built and led forward as a software company. I love it.

2. Word Processing + Publishing

As a writer, the thing I know Microsoft best for is their Office suite of software, and most specifically the program Word. Almost every writer I know uses or has used Word at some point. It's like Kleenex in that some people use the specific product name to stand in for the more generic term. Most people don't say, "Can I have a tissue?" they ask, "Can I have a kleenex?" Likewise, many of my clients don't as me, "Send me a word processing document," they say, "Send me a Word Doc."

And every eBook publishing tool out there has a way for you to upload either a Word .doc or a .pdf. It's because so many people use it that the new tools absolutely have to give writers a way to convert those Word docs.

Now, the exciting part is that if Microsoft owned Nook Media, I can imagine one of the first things they would do is create a software tool that allowed writers to create something directly for eBook format. Or potentially a way to export straight from Word into .epub or .mobi, or both. That's ridiculously exciting for authors like me. And if I had my way, they would tweak Microsoft Word to make it easier still to format that eBook within the existing software.

3. Nook Marketshare

If Nook Media is already planning to get rid of their tablet next year, they must be expanding into software. Which is great for the reasons I've listed already, but it's even better because Nook will have its attention and sights set on expanding their marketshare. And they'll be doing it by creating software, ideally that can be used and compatible with the other eReaders that are out there. Would you like Microsoft to design a more intuitive and versatile process for publishing or reading eBooks on your device? I'd like to see what they come up with for sure.

What do you think about this potential buyout and what it could mean for eBook publishing?

Images courtesy of Lead Nook photo from writingishard and internal Microsoft Word image by Baycon Group