The walls around Barnes & Noble‘s Nook walled garden are tumbling down. The company’s Nook HD and Nook HD+ are credible content-consumption tablets — remarkably credible, actually, considering that they come from a 127-year-old bookseller. But they sold so poorly over the holiday season that it raised questions about whether B&N would end up being forced to de-emphasize its hardware business in favor of selling content on other platforms. The Nooks use Barnes & Noble’s own custom version of Android and provide its own stores for books, magazines, newspapers and apps. And therein lies an oft-raised argument against buying a Nook: the Barnes & Noble application store has had only 10,000 pieces of software — mostly for-pay ones — vs. the hundreds of thousands of choices in Google’s Google Play. So with one fell swoop, in the form of a software update being rolled out today, B&N is eliminating that downside. It’s giving both Nooks the Google Play stores for apps, music, movies and books, plus key Google apps which the tablets have lacked until now: Chrome, Gmail and YouTube. (Google’s policies for its apps are an all-or-nothing proposition for device makers — if they want Google Play, they also have to pre-install Google’s apps.) New Nooks sold at Barnes & Noble’s bookstores and elsewhere will also carry the updated software. The bottom line: if something’s available for Android, it’s now available for Nook, assuming it’s compatible from a technical standpoint. Among other things, that means you’ll be able to install Amazon’s Kindle app on a Nook and read books you’ve purchased from Amazon. For the first time, the notion of someone with a heavy investment in Kindle books buying a Nook doesn’t sound completely impractical. Apps you bought from Barnes & Noble will be marked with an “n” label (for Nook). And if you’ve bought Google Play apps for another Android device, they’ll be downloaded to your Nook at no extra charge. The arrival of the standard Android stores and apps doesn’t mean that the Nooks are becoming plain-vanilla, … Continue reading Barnes & Noble Puts Google’s Play Store and Apps on the Nook