Raves for Robert Brunner’s All-New Nook

Barnes & Noble may be lagging behind Amazon.com in the market for electronic readers, but lately there are reasons for the bookseller to brag. The company believes it has a 27 percent share of the U.S. market for e-books—a market that the Pew Research Center reports has exploded, with 12 percent of all U.S. households now owning e-readers, up from 6 percent in November. And while the original Nook and its tablet-like successor the Nook Color received mixed reviews, the company’s newest black-and-white e-reader, the All-New Nook, appears to be a critical hit. On June 17, ranked the Nook ahead of the Kindle for the first time, praising its long battery life, $139 price tag, and minimalist design that focuses a user’s attention on reading.

At the center of Barnes & Noble’s efforts to keep up with the likes of Amazon and Apple is Robert Brunner, founder of the San Francisco-based industrial design firm Ammunition and a father, of sorts, to the portable computer. As director of industrial design at Apple in the late ’80s and early ’90s (before Steve Jobs’s return), Brunner helped develop the PowerBook, one of the first mainstream laptops, and the Newton, Apple’s influential but unsuccessful pen-based handheld device. As a partner at Pentagram Design from 1996 to 2007, he helped Amazon conceptualize and design the first Kindle—before the e-commerce giant brought all its hardware efforts in house. Now Brunner is playing the same role for the competition, helping an analog bookseller remake its business so it can compete with the big boys of digital. “We think Robert is truly one of the unique designers of consumer-electronic gadgets,” says William J. Lynch Jr., Barnes & Noble’s chief executive officer. “He pushes the team to ask, what do we want this product to do at its core?”