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Nook Color Rooted — Will B&N Embrace the Tablet?
itwbennett writes "It can browse the web, edit Office docs, run apps. Is it a low-cost, low-function e-reader? Nope, it's a Nook. And now that XDA has rooted it, how Barnes & Noble responds will determine whether the Nook has a tablet future, says blogger Ryan Faas. 'If the device can be turned into a capable Android tablet (which technically it already is) easily, the $250 price tag certainly beats out some of the competition.'"
How they react will likely depend on their price setting method.
If the nook was priced under cost and expected to be subsidised by ebook sales, then they will come down on this like apple. If they are making money on the thing in its own right, they may react like a BSD developer.
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A BOOK READER, needs to get jailbroken. Way to go guys, way to go. What's next would you make me give you money to look at your ugly advertisement billboards by the side of the road?
As soon as I saw this thing was rooted, I ran out and bought one - partially because it is a really nice little Android tablet, but mostly because it's a damn nice reader. The first app I put on it was the Kindle app. It's arguably the best Kindle reader out there.
I also bought some Nook books, which I had not done before.
I would not have either purchased a Nook (I expect there will be better/cheaper Android tabs very shortly - look at all the dual core tegra tablets on the way...) or purchased any Nook Books, except it now runs my Kindle library.
The Nook absolutely rocks, BTW. Wonderful form factor, lots of space, pretty quick, decent price. Could maybe use a few more buttons (menu and back are missing) but that can be worked around. It also needs Froyo, but other than that, awesome device.
Would love to see iSuppli pricing for this thing; since it's basically a repackaged Beagle Board, I bet they are doing OK on each unit. Got to be much cheaper to build than an iPad and iSuppli priced that at $229 back in February - and that had a lot more flash on board. $150?
That I can then get _my_ books off of my nook onto my laptop in a readable format?
I don't know about the Nook Color, but for the Nook itself, yes you can: easily. Without jailbreaking.
First, connect the Nook via USB. It's just a USB storage device using FAT32. All your downloaded ebooks will be in "my B&N downloads" on the root of the device. Annoyingly they're named by random numbers, but whatever, you can still grab them and get them off the device.
They will be DRMed, but the DRM is cracked and trivial: the key is the name on your credit card plus the credit card number itself. The idea is that you won't be willing to distribute the key. (Which is somewhat silly, since the key is actually an SHA1 hash of your credit card and name, and therefore you're really not giving anything out.)
Just Google for "ignoblekey" and "ignobleepub" and you should find two Python scripts to handle decrypting the files.
Finally, you'll need an application that supports reading EPUB files on your laptop. Calibre is apparently the best choice for Linux, so try "emerge calibre" and see if that works.
Also, there's no limit to the number of devices that you can copy the epub files to. As long as you log in to the Nook software using your account, you should be able to download books to any device that supports the Nook software. Which doesn't include Linux. Or Mac OS X. But does include the iPad, making me wonder why anyone would want to get a Nook Color.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I'm kind of torn on the subject. On the one hand, it's nice to have options, but on the other hand, we shouldn't need to do this in the first place in order to do what we want with paid for content, and by buying into these DRM schemes we're reinforcing their validity. Not only that, it's driving legitimate customers to the tools of piracy in order to do what they should be able to do by default.
He's talking out of his ass. There's nothing wrong with reading non-Amazon books on the Kindle. I do it exclusively - I have yet to buy anything from them. Just make sure you download the mobi files or use Calibre to convert the text.
Yes it would cost and they may not have the option too.
Google has requirements for a device to get the App Market. It pretty much has to be a phone. Most tablets don't have the App Market. Also by creating their own app market they can make money off the apps. It is really that simple. So yes it will cost them money.
Now I do feel B&N not putting the Kindle app on their reader is dumb as a box of rocks. I like a lot of people already have a Kindle. I would love to get this and use it as a reader and if the shopping system was really good and the prices good I would buy books from B&N as well as Amazon.
Right now Amazon has me because they have more of the books I want and I already have a Kindle. B&N is missing the chance to take me from Amazon.
And yes the NookColor with the App store would be a very very interesting product and I too would buy it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They will be DRMed, but the DRM is cracked and trivial: the key is the name on your credit card plus the credit card number itself. The idea is that you won't be willing to distribute the key. (Which is somewhat silly, since the key is actually an SHA1 hash of your credit card and name, and therefore you're really not giving anything out.)
I might not be able to work out what name+number made 298AC...898EAB, but B&N certainly can -- they have a list of all the name+number combinations.
The whole point of B&N (or Amazon) releasing their own e-reader is to lock people into buying e-books exclusively from them. I'm wiling to bet that they subsidize the cost of their devices in exchange for the expected profits from this vendor lock-in. If so, then every Nook that isn't used to buy e-books, or that is used to buy e-books from a rival source, represents a net loss for B&N. Allowing the Nook Color to remain rooted would encourage just such alternative uses, which is why I don't expect it to be tolerated.
(HEY Barnes and Nobel! If I could extend a nook account to include my Gentoo laptop as one of my five allowed clone devices, I would have bought the thing. Just Sayin...)
You do realize that the cost of supporting one of the more obscure and arcane Linux distributions probably outweighs the income it would bring in, right? If you want to advocate for desktop Linux, you'll be far more effective if you ask for Fedora or Ubuntu support. Even that isn't all that likely to happen in the near future, but it beats tilting at windmills.
Not on the color version. Free 3G is only available on $199 grey scale version.
It's actually locked down something fierce. Unlike Amazon, where you get free 3G, the nook's 3G is limited to B&N only. You cannot go anywhere else unless you can bounce it through B&N's servers. Access to anything else (via the web browser) is WiFi-only.
(Yes, you can do that - it's how carriers can differentiate between a featurephone dataplan, a blackberry dataplan, a smartphone dataplan, tethering plan, and full VPN dataplans. All overring various levels or proxies, image deresolution, NAT, firewalling, and the like. Full VPN is most expensive, but it gets you a real life IP address, while the tethers usually just get you some NAT'd thing. Featurephone plans are limited to certain sites only and images are rescaled for the tiny screen, etc.
In the same vein, carriers can limit your access to certain sites, like the nook is restricted to B&N only.
No, it would cost $0 to support. All they have to do is give out ePubs without drm. Then it can be read everywhere.
Currently he can just crack their drm and do what he wants with the files anyway.
Harry Potter (and books like it) saved the world of literature for the next generation as sad as that is. These books aren't high art, but they got a whole group of kids interested in reading that never would have otherwise.
It's also trivially easy with a few python scripts to strip the DRM from any kindle book you've purchased legally (think about it- the kindle has to be able to decrypt the book, and it's running on a pretty small chip). All you need to do is extract your decrypt key from the kindle, which turns out to be a function of the kindle's serial number.
I've done this for all the books I've bought for the kindle, to save a "just in case" version. It's also worth noting that the majority of piratebay books are pretty lousy OCR scans of books, with lots of markup and text errors. All the harry dresden books, for example, decided to be in a bold fond in the version I downloaded. Makes purchasing them a LOT more worthwhile (which I ended up doing for the first few, until I decided to give up on the series, but that's another story).
Still, I recognize that purchasing from amazon/bn/whoever is just supporting the business model of DRM, even if I strip out the DRM later. Would be nice to get somebody who didn't use platform lockin techniques, but that's probably unlikely in the near term.
I would agree that the Kindle makes a really awful device for watching videos, surfing the web or just about any activity other than reading books. The display is only gray scale and it is very slow compared to a LCD monitor. I would not want to do much writing on a Kindle as the keyboard is not really suited for it.
However, that being said, the Kindle is a really fine reading device and the free web connectivity means you can go out to web sites and download free books. It is not restricted in any way to Amazon. I have had a Kindle for almost two years and have spent maybe $100 total on Amazon books while downloading hundreds of free books. Yes, I travel a lot.
PDFs are only usable after being converted with something like Caliber or being processed by the (free) Kindle service. The problem is PDF is a page description language and the Kindle displays PDF documents as they were originally formatted. You can zoom out to see a page but it is a rare PDF document that fits on the screen in a viewable size. The Kindle DX was supposed to fix this and does to some extent but the problem still exists there as well - and the DX is just too big for most ordinary uses.
The answer with PDF is to have a reader that automatically reflows the pages and use only PDF files which are designed for this sort of reflow behavior. My understanding is that this only happens with true Adobe software with Adobe DRM - which neither the Kindle or Nook has. Without this PDF documents should be converted to a format for the device for viewing. And if it doesn't convert well, it wouldn't have been readable on a Kindle or Nook anyway so forget about it.