Perhaps, but there certainly was (and still is) a not-insignificant amount of people interested in hacking both Nooks and Kindles. Sell a hackable version at a big markup to please the nerds and make some money; regular folks will find them useless or too difficult and stick to the standard offering; meanwhile the nerds will evangelize the hardware for you.
I think their big fear is people buying a hackable version and setting it up to be a generic epub reader instead of a walled-garden sales point, thus losing money on the hardware or perhaps support costs for people who messed up their devices. But hacking hardware, even if it just means transferring a .deb and restarting, is utterly beyond the kind of people who would rather just press "buy & download" and forget about it, which of course is 90% of the market anyway.
In either case a premium hackable ereader would be an interesting (though perhaps not profitable?) direction for anyone, even an indie company, to pursue.
The nook pretty much is a generic ePub reader. I made sure of that when we decided to go with Adobe's ePub engine. Side-load all of the ePubs you want, hell you can use it to read library ePubs.
It is simple economics - as much as us (engineers, developers, etc) believe we are a large market, we are not. The overhead of creating a different SKU to serve <1% of a market is not enough. Besides, the money is not in hardware, it is in content.
I think their big fear is people buying a hackable version and setting it up to be a generic epub reader instead of a walled-garden sales point, thus losing money on the hardware or perhaps support costs for people who messed up their devices. But hacking hardware, even if it just means transferring a .deb and restarting, is utterly beyond the kind of people who would rather just press "buy & download" and forget about it, which of course is 90% of the market anyway.
In either case a premium hackable ereader would be an interesting (though perhaps not profitable?) direction for anyone, even an indie company, to pursue.