Barnes & Noble\'s Old Nook Tablets Are Finally Shutting Down

Barnes & Noble already announced that it was ending support for its older eReaders. Now, the company’s oldest color tablets are joining the retirement party, and there’s an upgrade offer available for affected owners.

The book retailer Barnes & Noble has confirmed that four tablets will soon be unsupported. The first is the Nook Color, released in 2010 as an Android 2.2 tablet with a 7-inch screen. Next is the Nook Tablet, a 2012 model that was a more direct competitor against the iPad and Amazon Kindle Fire. The Nook HD and Nook HD+ from 2012 are also on the chopping block, which were standard Android tablets as well.

Barnes & Noble previously confirmed in November that three of its older eReaders would be losing online services: the 2011 Nook Simple Touch, the 2012 Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, and the 2013 Nook GlowLight. Downloaded books will continue to work on those models, in both PDF and ePub format, but all purchased books won’t be accessible on those devices anymore.

The Nook tablets stopped receiving updates years ago, but they can still read books and other purchased content from Barnes & Noble. That will end in June 2024, when they will lose their ability to connect to the company’s servers for downloading and synchronizing books. The actual purchased content won’t be lost—they are stored in the connected B&N account—but the content won’t be viewable on those devices anymore.

The Nook Tablet and Nook HD devices are a callback to when Barnes & Noble tried to be a major player in the tablet industry, alongside Apple, Amazon, and other early rivals. The devices sold reasonably well, but not well enough to put a dent in the rapid rise of the iPad. Barnes & Noble had reportedly sold around five million Nook tablets by late 2012, while the Kindle Fire was at seven million units and the iPad had reached a staggering 84 million units.

The older Nook tablets were also popular devices for installing custom ROMs, but those efforts ended a long time ago, as the tablets became too old and people moved onto newer hardware. Barnes & Noble exited the tablet business in 2013, and since then, it has partnered with Samsung and Lenovo to occasionally release Nook-branded versions of existing tablets.

If you have one of the affected models, you have until the end of April to get a $30 coupon for a Nook GlowLight 4e or Nook 9” Lenovo Tablet.

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