Touch Putting Kindle books on a nook?

[learning2]

I'm looking at getting a basic e-reader, and I like the Nook touch better than the Kindle touch (just played with them a bit at the stores, no extensive experience with either).

I'm wondering about how to make it more of a vendor-neutral reader, though: If I want to read a kindle book on a nook, it seems that there are two approaches: Get a converter program, convert the book on my computer than load it on the nook. Root the nook, add amazon app to it.

If anyone does either of these with a Nook touch, I'd like to hear recommendations.

If I root the nook, does that affect the way that it displays nook books as well? Is format conversion more of a hassle than it's worth?

Thanks!

[toddos]

Two options:

1. Root and install Amazon's Kindle app. Rooting should be relatively safe, but keep in mind that you're intentionally doing something that the reader wasn't initially designed to do. Things may break. But there's also a fairly large community of devs who are dedicated to this stuff and can help you out if you run into problems.

2. Remove DRM and convert. Neither step is difficult, but I will not talk about the former (DRM removal) here except to say, "Apprentice Alf is your friend". The latter is pretty trivial with Calibre. Mobi (Kindle's ebook format) converts to epub very nicely and Calibre is a mature product that has been doing it for a while, and in fact is often used by publishers and others to convert between various formats (gasp!).

I do option #2, simply because it's easy enough to do and I have no other reason to root my Nook STR.

[DuckFOO]

Something I've worried about, when converting Mobi to Epub, is text and layout fidelity. Has anyone ever performed a detail comparison of the result of this kind of conversion?

[toddos]

Originally Posted by DuckFOO

Something I've worried about, when converting Mobi to Epub, is text and layout fidelity. Has anyone ever performed a detail comparison of the result of this kind of conversion?

Mobi to epub is actually pretty simple, since mobi is based on the Open eBook standard and epub is a further extension of the same standard. Both use a subset of XHTML, with epub supporting more than mobi.

Going the other way can be more difficult, as there are things you can do in epub layout that you can't do in mobi layout, as well as other features that are missing in mobi (TOC, for example). But very few books are so complicated as to cause a problem.

[Dopedangel]

If you are willing to remove drm from your books then on a rooted nook you can use coolreader for reading mobi as well as epub so no need for changing readers or converting etc.

Coolreader is way better for reading than nook's own reader as you can define all the 4 page turn buttons to do other things apart from turning pages. Ability to define the formatting you want and lot of different fonts.

[RAH]

The DRM removal method is pretty easy using the Calibre plugin, as others have said. You would buy the Amazon book using Kindle for PC and then remove the DRM. Then convert it to epub using Calibre again, and put it on your Nook. From what I have seen, the formatting in the epub is excellent.

[GreenMonkey]

Be careful that a very small portion of Amazon's books (mainly nonfiction I think) is in TOPAZ format which is a PITA to convert. I returned the one book I bought this way before I realized their existence (for a history class) and bought it from B&N instead for my Nook.

The effort to de-DRM Topaz and convert it wasn't worth it last I knew. Maybe it's gotten better.

[aagstn]

Originally Posted by GreenMonkey

The effort to de-DRM Topaz and convert it wasn't worth it last I knew. Maybe it's gotten better.

It has not unless I'm missing a program to do it with. I recently bought a $1.99 book and it was topaz so my only option is to read it on my Kindle app on iPad.