Barnes and Noble Nook appears to be in serious trouble

If you are a Nook customer, keep a very close eye on this situation. If they don't get the ship righted soon or sell to a viable competitor, IMO, you could eventually lose access to your Nook ebooks.

A couple of related links:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...neering-staff/
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...oliday-season/

In my own case, I have stopped buying ebooks from B&N. I have downloaded and stored my Nook ebooks independently of my Nook and any B&N computer program.

Finally, I have began using Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ to organize my ebooks from B&N (and anyone else I buy from.) There is a learning curve to Calibre (along with making Nook ebooks usable for readers other than Nook tablets or Nook PC programs.) But for me, I felt I had no choice. I had purchased nearly 90 books and didn't want to lose access to them if B&N closed ebooks for good.

This sort of thing is just one reason why I stick with printed books. They take up more space, but they won't disappear and will still be readable 50 years from now or more.

And they don't need batteries either. :)

I completely understand the paper side of it. :)

But due to the limitations of carrying around larger books and the lack of permanent storage space, I had more or less stopped reading books. But I still missed them. When ebooks became well established, I felt it they were the solution to my problem. And with few exceptions, they have been.

Now I'm reading 1 to 2 books a month and they all fit quite nicely on anything I place them on. They are easy to read, especially under less than ideal lighting conditions. Type/font size no longer matters to my ever weaker eyes. Plus, no matter how physically large the book, it always fits in my coat/jacket pocket.

The Nook problems were a jolt to me, but after it's all done and said, I ended up taking far better protection of my investments. Before I took action, my books were only on my Nook and at B&N. Now I have everything backed up in multiple locations and in multiple ebook formats.

Should the landscape change again, IMO, I'm prepared for it.