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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.'"

8 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 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
    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

  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. 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.