Goodnight and good Nook: farewell to a beloved e-reader

Barnes & Noble has shut down its ebook store. It may have been overshadowed and outsold by the Kindle, but for some readers, it was briefly a revelation

Barnes & Noble is shutting down its Nook app store, the slightly niche portal through which it sold ebooks for its e-reader, the Nook.

I bought my Nook in a panic, when I was on my way to interview someone whose book would otherwise have taken six weeks to arrive. I viewed it as I do contactless payment and automatic windscreen wipers, with the reverence of the digital-latecomer, pathetically grateful and astonished, like the tribespeople confronted with a telly in The Gods Must Be Crazy. I hadn't even processed at the time that I had all the boon of a Kindle with none of the tax avoidance of Amazon; indeed, I didn't even realise it was serviced by Barnes and Noble. There were some glitches - when I tried to buy Pornland by the anti-pornography campaigner Gail Dines, it repeatedly gave me Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot instead. I decided in the end that there was no dark conspiracy behind this; if someone were deliberately making mischief, they would have replaced it with some actual porn, right? That's what situationist pranks are for.