My husband bought me a Nook.™ The Barnes & Noble employee who sold it to him implied that I could only get e-books from them. Is that true?
I don’t want that to be true. Please, say she just wanted to keep the profit in house.
I don’t really like it at all. I like my big, heavy tomes, but, I have arthritis in my hands and they’re becoming hard to hold. The thing is, the Nook™ hurts almost as much.
I can’t stop reading! My brain will shrivel up to a raisin! I’ll forget how to talk! I’ll be understandable only by third graders!
Here’s my understanding; I’m sure others will be able to correct or supplement it:
The nook is designed to read e-books in the epub format. Some other sources (e.g. Project Gutenberg) have e-books available in this and other formats, and you should be able to read them just fine on your nook.
The ebooks that Amazon sells (for use with its line of Kindle e-readers) are in a different format, which your nook will not (natively) recognize. However, there may be ways around this:
(1) Depending on sort of nook you have, you may be able to run a Kindle app on it, which would enable you to use it to read Kindle-format books from Amazon.
(2) You may be able to convert e-books from other formats to the epub format your nook can read. The free Calibre program can handle this fairly easily as long as the ebooks you’re trying to convert don’t have DRM (Digital Rights Management). (Some books do, some don’t.)
(3) Some Dopers in previous threads have mentioned that they have ways of circumventing the DRM in order to convert ebooks; but there may be legal issues that would prevent anyone from explaining here how you would go about doing that.
In my experience, reading Amazon ebooks on a Nook is a pain in the ass. You’ll have to download a program called Calibre to your PC and modify the files before uploading them to your Nook. Unfortunately, I am not computer savvy at all, and I couldn’t figure out how to download part of the program and I finally threw my hands up.
You can read non-B&N books on your Nook, though. It’s just the Kindle ones are in an Amazon proprietary format that has to be stripped away. If you are better with computers than me and have access to a large Kindle library, it may be worth your time.
Yes, I need books in the Epub format. I can get them from Barnes and Noble. I get ebooks in the Epub format from other places on the internet. Those I can’t load directly from wifi into my Nooks. I have to download them onto my computer, hook up the cable from my USB port to the port on my Nook, and copy them onto my Nook.
And if the ebook is only available in Mobi format (the one for Kindle), I use the Calibre program to reformat it to Epub before I copy it to my Nook. It’s not that difficult and the books come out well. And as you go along, you’ll find different sources of books in Epub format. I’m not sure why someone would be against buying ebooks from B&N but okay with buying them from Amazon. Kindle is generally the only ebook reader that uses the Mobi format. Most others use Epub.
The Seattle Public Library is one of the best for ebooks, as far as selection and availability go, so even if it takes a little figuring at first, it’s really worth it. Once you get the process down, it’s super easy.
Since you complained about the weight, you might have one of the tablet Nooks, in which case you should be able to download apps from Nook or Google Play for all the other bookstores, including Amazon but excluding Apple, as well as the Overdrive app for the library. Then you can do everything right from your device to get ebooks.
If you have an e-ink Nook then the procedure is a bit different since you can’t put apps on it. Library books are not that hard, but you do need to download them to your computer and then transfer them using your USB cable to your Nook, using a program called Adobe Digital Editions. Once you set that up, it’s easy to get ebooks from other places as well since other than Apple all the epub vendors (Kobo, Google Books, etc) use Adobe DRM so the procedure to put them on your Nook is the same.
Nope, I have the cheap, black on gray, that only reads books and magazines. It does have a back light, that’s it’s only frill.
It only weighs a few ownces,but my hands hurt if they are in one position too long, so do my knees.
If you need any help figuring out how to put any ebooks on your Nook, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help. I have a ton of ebooks I can even send you if you want.
My library has a staff member available about twice a month to show you how to borrow books on an e-reader.
I bought a nook but after a while I bought a tablet for some other purpose (stupid games in bed at night) which has a bigger screen than the nook and is actually lighter, and I installed the nook app (free from barnes & noble) and now I can access my nook library from the tablet and it’s much easier for me to read. You can also get a nook app for windows if you have a laptop you want to read on. On which you wish to read. duh.
Libraries should have eBooks that a Nook can read. Ours does, and it’s not the best library system in the world.
Don’t worry about using Calibre. You need something to manage books on your Nook anyway and this is a pretty good program for that plus the bonus of conversion.
I have two Nooks and rooted both of them. My Simple Touch is my actual eBook reader and I installed FBReader on it which is better than B&N’s program. The HD+ I just use as my tablet computer.
If I want, I could install the Kindle Android app and the whole Amazon eBook experience would be there.
The Nook is much more easily modifiable than a Kindle, so you have more flexibility in apps, options, etc.
Sure you can. I have a Nook, and I’ve gotten several books from other sources. I’ve even created a couple. Downloading from B&N is the easiest way, but far from the only way.
