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Nook Color Rooted — Will B&N Embrace the Tablet?

Posted by timothy on from the what-technology-wants dept.

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.'"

14 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Reaction by Barny · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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    /me sighs
    1. Re:Reaction by FatLittleMonkey · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Mind you, loss leaders (which subsidised hardware for expensive consumables are) are a distortion of a free market. Anything which undermines it is wholesome and good.

      (Used to buy for a small retailer. Often the shelf price at large retailers was less than the wholesale price from the manufacturer/distributor. But they had "Three per customer" type limits, which turns out to be illegal under my State's consumer laws (written specifically to punish loss-leaders, apparently.) Used to make for fun public arguments.)

      --
      Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
    2. Re:Reaction by Barny · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, work in retail myself, in the past have been asked by a boss to go to a competitor and buy all their stock of one item, because they were selling it cheaper than our wholesaler.

      And yes, we have similar laws in my state too :)

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      /me sighs
    3. Re:Reaction by noidentity · · Score: 5, Funny

      Mind you, loss leaders (which subsidised hardware for expensive consumables are) are a distortion of a free market.

      Indeed, they shouldn't be allowed to do such a thing in a free market.

    4. Re:Reaction by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Mind you, loss leaders (which subsidised hardware for expensive consumables are) are a distortion of a free market. Anything which undermines it is wholesome and good.

      How? The consumer can decide what they want to buy and where - and get slower prices as a result. If consumables are the real profit center, a store could not sell the loss leader and put some of the savings to lower consumable prices; so the store selling the loss leader either lowers consumable prices or loses money. In the end, the consumer benefits from free market prices.

      A free market allows individuals to set prices and determine desired profits; not some manufacturer or government. Nor does it ensure everyone will make a profit.

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      I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
    5. Re:Reaction by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Please explain how this is a distortion of a free market.
      You have supply, demand and a fixed cost.
      Now if the supply and demand equilibrium falls under your fixed cost. That usually means that it may not be the best product to sell. However if over the use of the product there is the ability to bring in more revenue. Then the loss would be considered as an investment. Much the same as an advertising campaign. As right now the cost of the ereader is more then the market wants they will loose a lot more in content.

      It is a classic give away the razor and sell the blades.

      Now yes if it being sold under price B&N will make a fuss as they are giving a way a product that costs them money for no return.

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      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    6. Re:Reaction by noidentity · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, I figured the fact that I was saying something similar to "We all know that 1+1=3..." but I guess when it comes to the free market, such an obviously contradictory statement is commonplace and meant seriously, sadly.

    7. Re:Reaction by delinear · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Agreed - loss leaders in themselves are not a distortion of the free market. What would be a distortion is the producer being able to use the law to prevent people buying the razor and then using their own cheap blades (or in B&N's case, someone buying the Nook and not using it to buy books if it is indeed an example of a loss leader). A free market should allow you to come up with whatever promotional ideas you want to make money, but similarly it should allow your customers to ignore your ideas and do their own thing. The second those ideas have some element that is enforced by law (i.e. you can ONLY use product X with service Y and tampering with X to allow Z is illegal) it is no longer free.

    8. Re:Reaction by VisiX · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In this way it resembles nearly every other law on the books.

    9. Re:Reaction by jenningsthecat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Barnes and Noble is, first and foremost, a book retailer, dependant on and beholden to publishers. Since rooting is the first step towards defeating Digital Restrictions Management, I suspect that B&N will fight rooting as hard as they can for as long as they can, regardless of the Nook's pricing model.

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      'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  2. Re:Does this mean...? by _xeno_ · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
  3. Re:Does this mean...? by xaxa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. The Business Case Against Root-Tolerance by DCheesi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Does this mean...? by wembley+fraggle · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.