New users of the Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony Reader had an unpleasant surprise on Christmas Day and beyond, as a flood of requests temporarily delayed purchases tied to the B&N online store and forced Sony to shut down its online Reader store.
The feedback comes from online forums for both devices, as customers complained about either not be able to connect to the online store (in the case of Sony Reader users) or having purchases delayed indefinitely (something we suspect is related to merchant authorizations hanging). It's been a rough year for the authorization services: Best Buy stores were hit hard by delays on Black Friday because of credit-card authorization issues with HSBC (something that went unreported, by the way), and it sounds like those complaining about the Nook download problem is having the same issue.
With the Sony Reader store, the issue is more serious and ongoing. Sony officials rather stupidly decided to require a software upgrade for all Reader users to version 3.1. So before any buying could be done the software upgrade was required, even for those recently purchasing a Reader. Those 54-meg downloads must be downloading the system, because as of right now the Sony Reader store is down -- and has been for a serious length of time.
(For the record: We had no problems downloading two new books from the Barnes & Noble Website on Christmas Day, so we suspect the outages were a little more spotty than some reports in the media would have you believe.) --Kevin Reichard
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