[epstewart]

I have created a blog post, iBooks♥B&N: Let's Get Ignoble! (google "iBooks ignoble" w/o the quote marks), which gives detailed instructions on how users of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" can move B&N EPUBs to iBooks.

I♥CABBAGES has created a set of Python scripts (google "Circumventing Barnes & Noble DRM") that he refers to as "ignoble" — they resemble his earlier "inept" suite that de-DRMs e-books from Adobe — and that can be used to decrypt B&N EPUBs so that they can be imported into iTunes and thus iBooks on an iPhone or any other iOS 4.0 device, such as an iPad or an iPod Touch.

I♥CABBAGES's ignoble scripts are, of course, free. Except for one of them, ignoblekey, which runs only on Windows, they are platform-independent and can be used on Mac OS X Leopard. In my blog post, I show how to do that.

I also give hints as to how to use ignoble on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or on Windows platforms, but for the most part my blog post deals with the OS I have hands-on experience with: Leopard.

Barnes & Noble recently — and quietly — changed all their e-books from PDBs to EPUBs, so if you buy an e-book from B&N today, it will very likely be an EPUB. Plus, if you re-download an e-book you bought from them and originally received as a PDB, it will very likely re-download as a EPUB today ... so you can use ignoble to strip DRM from it, then import it into iTunes/iBooks.

Why move B&N EPUBs into iTunes/iBooks in the first place? It keeps you from having to switch between iBooks and the B&N eReader app on your iDevice, and from having to remember which e-books are in which app. Given that many, many e-books (those from the huge Random House library) aren't available at the iBookstore yet but are available from B&N, you can just buy them from B&N and then use ignoble to make them iBooks-compatible! My blog post shows how ...