Contradictory to the announcement, the company says it's still very much behind the Nook: "The company has done a significant amount of work to improve Nook's overall performance," said Fred Argir, Chief Digital Officer at Barnes and Noble. "While we have been able to reduce costs, we still have a lot more work to do to rationalize the business. We believe that by outsourcing certain technology functions of our Nook business we will further improve Nook's performance." And yet, at the same time, Amazon is so confident in next e-reader that its CEO is telling us all about it by his own volition.