B&N is shuttering Nook in every location except the UK and US. Meanwhile, even here, Anna discovered that Barnes and Noble’s new website only talks to Internet Explorer on Windows. Nothing else will let her log in. If you look at the code, it seems to be testing for IE versions then throwing some obsfucated JavaScript code at you that doesn’t work on anything but recent Explorer.

For the record, Internet Explorer is currently about 12% of web traffic.

Interestingly, if I tell Safari to ID itself at IE 8 or 9, I can get a login box. It’s throwing different code in those cases. Identifying as IE 10 creates the same behaviour as the Safari user agent string. There are also some reports that for other people – at least some percentage of users – it works on Chrome on Windows. But it’s definitely not working here, tonight.

This is crazy. They’ve locked out as much as 88% of potential customers in North America. It doesn’t work on any Safari, including mobile. It doesn’t work on any version of Chrome, or Firefox, that Anna can find to test.

This is amazing. And once you do manage to get logged in, all you get really is a tile-display of books you’ve bought and no option to download them or anything – the links just go to those books’ sales pages. It’s a disaster.

I hope Kobo buys their Nook customer base soon, like they did with Sony. Amazon needs some sort of ePub competition. Nook clearly doesn’t want to be it.

eta: Apparently some people can log in on various shades of Chrome on Windows, but it’s inconsistent. Anna was able to log in on Safari on Macintosh this morning – for a while.