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The CEO of Barnes & Noble got a lot of attention when he mentioned plans to add an NFC ability to a future Nook so it can buy ebooks in store, but it looks like at least one publisher has beaten him to the punch.
The newly released print edition of Patrick Meyer’s Steve Jobs and the World of Mobile, which hit store shelves earlier this month, has an NFC chip embedded in the front cover.
I’ve written about NFC before when I covered Samsung’s nation-wide ad campaign. They’ve been putting up posters that included NFC chips that would transfer ebooks, music, or other free content to a late-model Samsung smartphone when you tapped the phone to the poster.
The NFC chip in the cover of Meyer’s book works in a similar fashion. It allows book browsers to watch an interview of Meyer. All they have to do is tap the book with their NFC-equipped smartphone.
This is an interesting idea, but I’m not sure what it would be good for beyond marketing the book. As I see it, a link or a QR code would be as useful to someone who had already bought the book, so about the only way an NFC chip would be more useful would be to get the attention of someone browsing in a bookstore. That potential customer would be much more likely to tap their smartphone to the book cover than they would scan a QR code (it’s easier).
But as interesting as this idea is, I’m not sure there’s any reason to pursue it. More and more retailing shifts online and the average time a book spends on a store shelf is dropping, so I’m not sure there’s real value to tricks like this. It feels more like a once off trick which might be used for specific titles that get a lot of marketing support but might not be so useful for the many other books published every year.