Classic Nook 1.5 Update Confirmed

[lionel47]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Why should non-B&N books be any different? A book is a book.

Do you have a job? I'm beginning to think Amazon pays you to annoy people here.

[chas0039]

Originally Posted by geertm

As an aside. I do not understand why people feel they should keep hundreds or even thousands of non-B&N books on their Nook. All my non-B&N books (more than 2000) are archived on my PC. I keep some 10 to 20 non-B&N books on my Nook as the next books that I want to read.

I can understand how your system works for you, but I, as well as a few others, read a lot of books at the same time. In my case about 15. If you were right for everyone, then there would be no reason for any eBook manufacturer to offer any storage capacity at all. Just add a book or two at a time from your computer. Think how MP3 players would have fared if they said you need to add songs from your computer every time you want to change an album. Or how would you like it if you needed to get out your collection of CDs every time you wanted to view a picture. Taking it to the ridiculous, just unload a program when you want to use a different one and add the new software from the discs...every time. I owned one of those computers back in the early 80s.

Anyhow, eBooks belong on my eReader. I have been accumulating for 10+ years and I want my collection where it belongs, just the same as I keep my books in bookcases, not in boxes in the garage where I can go dig them out when I want them. You are right for you, but not for most of us. And B&N crippling something to make it frustrating to read books you don't buy from them is a very backwards business plan. Let's see, annoy the customer to the point that he will spend more money with us. If I taught that concept in business school to my students, they would seriously think of calling the guys in the white coats.

[Nahgem]

Originally Posted by geertm

As an aside. I do not understand why people feel they should keep hundreds or even thousands of non-B&N books on their Nook. All my non-B&N books (more than 2000) are archived on my PC. I keep some 10 to 20 non-B&N books on my Nook as the next books that I want to read.

I can't speak for anyone else, but having the ability to carry hundreds of books at once was part of the appeal in buying an eReader. I don't usually just sit down and read one book straight through. I read twenty pages from one, fifty pages from another, and so on, and what I want to read today may be totally different than what I want to read tomorrow. I don't have the time to keep swapping books based on what I think I'll want to read this afternoon. It's a lot easier to just dump everything on the reader, then pick and choose later at my leisure. Will I ever read EVERYTHING I have on it? No, but at least I'll never find myself thinking, "I wish I had put this book on my reader this morning."

ETA: and I was beat to the punch. Ah, well.

[boswd]

Originally Posted by lionel47

Do you have a job? I'm beginning to think Amazon pays you to annoy people here.

I had friend in college who was a paid troll they do exist!

[thrawn_aj]

Originally Posted by geertm

As an aside. I do not understand why people feel they should keep hundreds or even thousands of non-B&N books on their Nook. All my non-B&N books (more than 2000) are archived on my PC. I keep some 10 to 20 non-B&N books on my Nook as the next books that I want to read.

Because some of us like to be whimsical about entertainment. There is nothing more amazing to me than being thousands of miles from home and still having everything I'd ever want to read right at my fingertips. At any rate, I for one don't expect B&N to do anything about this. Haven't you ever been reading something and thought of that one obscure book in the back of your shelf that you hadn't read in 10 years and had this overwhelming desire to read it immediately? At any rate, you were very careful to add "non-B&N books" to all your sentences. Why do you keep more than a handful of B&N books on the nook then? Why not just archive everything but a handful?

Of course, since they feel justified in playing these foolish marketing games, I feel equally justified in doing everything I can (and hang the legality - short of piracy of course) to organize my ebooks my way.

Also, if the B&N yahoos had a modicum of sense, they wouldn't be so short-sighted about this issue. Forcing customers to buy ebooks from them (or face a crippled book reader) is costing them future customers by the ton. Clearly, they have no confidence in their products or pricing to believe that customers would continue to buy from them without these weaselly tactics. Strange, considering that they're pretty good (not perfect) about matching Amazon's prices book for book. After price-comparisons, I would probably have decided to buy from B&N more often than not. As it is, I don't appreciate being forced into things so I'll be deliberately not buying from them. And I know I'm not alone in this.

It's really sad, they could have cleaned out the market if they'd just played their cards right. They could have been Google to Amazon's Microsoft (only when it comes to ebooks - I have no complaints with Amazon in other respects). But they had to get all paranoid and insecure and throw it all away.

[JeffElkins]

Originally Posted by Nahgem

I can't speak for anyone else, but having the ability to carry hundreds of books at once was part of the appeal in buying an eReader.

+10

So, can you do this with a rooted Nook? I happen to be shopping for a replacement for my PRS 505.

[chas0039]

Wouldn't it be nice if they spent some time reading forums like this and had one of those "AhAh" moments when they realized how misdirected their policies are. Naaaa, never mind. We have a better chance of a balance budget.

[hrosvit]

Originally Posted by geertm

As an aside. I do not understand why people feel they should keep hundreds or even thousands of non-B&N books on their Nook. All my non-B&N books (more than 2000) are archived on my PC. I keep some 10 to 20 non-B&N books on my Nook as the next books that I want to read.

I will echo everyone else. Why do I need to keep thousands of non B&N books on my Nook? Because I want to. That's one of the reasons I bought this reader: so I could add an SD card and jam thousands upon thousands of books on it. So when I'm trapped in an airport or a hotel in East Buttcrack I don't need to worry if I'll be able to find anything interesting to read; I'll have a whole library at my disposal. And, quite frankly, if the theory is that I never need more than 20 books on my ereader, then why in the world would they put 2GB of storage on it, along with the ability to add another 16GB? I've got 18GB of storage on my nook, enough room for 13,500 books (give or take a couple). I could probably fit 20 books on 32MB of storage; all the rest of that space is just going to waste.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by lionel47

Do you have a job? I'm beginning to think Amazon pays you to annoy people here.

My, there certainly are a lot of people on Amazon's payroll around here.

[Nahgem]

I can't speak for anyone else, but having the ability to carry hundreds of books at once was part of the appeal in buying an eReader.

You can do it with the non-rooted Nook, you just don't get much in the way of book organization (hence the complaints). You can sort by title/author only in the non B&N menu; the new update should be adding additional organization to the B&N menu, and possibly the ability to search the non B&N menu (hopes and prays).

I haven't rooted, but my understanding is that rooting combines the two menus into one, and includes folders for organization. Though, I also have read that newer Nooks can't be rooted.

[DuncanWatson]

Originally Posted by JeffElkins

+10

So, can you do this with a rooted Nook? I happen to be shopping for a replacement for my PRS 505.

I do this today with my rooted Nook. I keep 171 books on my Nook today and read on average a book every 2 days. I am a frequent re-reader and am slowly replacing paper books with ebooks as well as buying new books as they are released.

My books are sorted with tags applied in Calibre for the most part. I also put folders but I prefer tags as I can have a given book with multiple tags. I generally archive my B&N books and modify the metadata with Calibre and put all my books via sideloading. When on vacation and reading heavily and away from my computer I will use B&N content for new books.

The entire purpose of my 18GB storage on my nook (with sd card) is to keep my entire e-library available to me wherever I am.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

My, there certainly are a lot of people on Amazon's payroll around here.

If so, they're overpaying the rest of the trolls.

[dayowl]

Originally Posted by geertm

I agree.

B&N would like to buy your e-books from their store, not other bookstores.
Amazon solved this problem by making it impossible to buy DRM content from other bookstores, by just supporting its own DRM format.
B&N supports the Abobe ePub DRM so you can buy books at other bookstores and has even licensed its own DRM to Adobe so other bookstores and e-readers are allowed to use it, so they need an other way to make you buy books at their store. They do this by making buying books at their store more attractive because it is easier to do, and you get extra features that you do not get with books from other bookstores.

I like the fact that unlike Amazon B&N has chosen to support books from other bookstores, and I cannot fault them for trying to promote their own bookstore.

I agree. Barnes & Noble does pretty well. I love the fact that I can go to any of their stores and read ANY e-book in their collection - for Free!

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by Nahgem

You can do it with the non-rooted Nook, you just don't get much in the way of book organization (hence the complaints). You can sort by title/author only in the non B&N menu; the new update should be adding additional organization to the B&N menu, and possibly the ability to search the non B&N menu (hopes and prays).

I haven't rooted, but my understanding is that rooting combines the two menus into one, and includes folders for organization. Though, I also have read that newer Nooks can't be rooted.

With a stock Nook, you can only search for side-loaded content by clicking through pages of books sorted by author or title, 10 books per page. Clearly, this is useless if you want to store more than about 100 side-loaded books on your Nook (and maybe less, if you're impatient).

With the rooted Nook, there's a library application that supports searching all books (B&N and side-loaded) by author, title, or keyword or cover view. There's a file browser, and there's a program that can download from Stanza or Calibre libraries, or navigate through a Calibre library converted to OPDS metadata.

I don't have one of the newer Nooks, but they can be rooted by someone with sufficient computer skills. I suspect that most new Nook owners will look at the method and decide (probably rightly) that it's beyond their capabilities. However, the older Nooks can be rooted by someone who can copy a couple of files to their Nook and follow a couple of simple directions (like turn off your Nook and turn it back on while pressing on the right > button).

[thrawn_aj]

Originally Posted by chas0039

Wouldn't it be nice if they spent some time reading forums like this and had one of those "AhAh" moments when they realized how misdirected their policies are. Naaaa, never mind. We have a better chance of a balance budget.

That's the only reason I bother to post in the B&N forum. Unfortunately, it's even more frustrating there because here at least I can connect the lack of results with the fact that no one in a position of power actually reads these posts. Over there, it's like they are listening in rapt attention only to go ahead and ignore every single thing when it comes time to put out updates or establish policies.

What's the point? "Customer feedback" appears to be a hollow mantra birthed by marketing hacks, fed by the PR schmucks and ultimately snuffed out by the corporate higher-ups and the cycle begins over.