Classic Finally got my nook! A couple of questions...

[geertm]

Originally Posted by afa

I've done that, but it still says "Invalid Credit Card".

Check if your card is mentioned as the deault credit card in your account information (manage credit card).
You are using a credit card, not a debit card? Debit cards are known to give problems.

Unfortunately I have no idea what else could be wrong.
You could try searching the B&N forum for your credit card brand. Perhaps there is a known problem with your credit card.

[afa]

Yeah, it's the default. It's just a standard Visa credit card issued by my bank, so I don't think that's the problem.

I had some problems with the other books as well, and then B&N randomly allowed me download them. It seems like a hit-and-miss sort of thing, rather than something that happens for a particular reason.

[geertm]

Originally Posted by afa

Yeah, it's the default. It's just a standard Visa credit card issued by my bank, so I don't think that's the problem.

I had some problems with the other books as well, and then B&N randomly allowed me download them. It seems like a hit-and-miss sort of thing, rather than something that happens for a particular reason.

I believe that B&N checks if your credit card is valid when you download a book by putting some kind of "pending charge" on it. Perhaps that sometimes does not work.

If you buy e-books at B&N every book is charged seperately, so there are a lot of small amounts charged on your credit card. The bank that issued my Visa card here in the Netherlands called me because they considered the B&N charges suspicious.
Perhaps B&N payments trigger some kind of warning for your card that causes your problem?

[afa]

The only books I've got through B&N so far have been freebies, so there shouldn't be a charge.

[geertm]

Originally Posted by afa

The only books I've got through B&N so far have been freebies, so there shouldn't be a charge.

Sorry, I am out of ideas.
Perhaps someone else has a solution.
Good luck!

[Fbone]

It's either your hotspot or credit card. If all your "purchases" were done through a proxy then that is probably ruled out. Geertm gave nicky added advice about books not all completely downloaded even if it initially looks like it did. BN cancels automatically.

Credit card seems possible, though. The randomness of it. And she also mentioned the small pending charges on credit cards even for free ebooks. Does your credit card company list pending charges on their banking website? A call to your credit card may be helpful, if they're blocking you. I would imagine 20 or so hits to your card would raise a security flag.

[afa]

No worries, geertm. Thanks for the help.

Fbone - the purchases seem to have gone through. I've gotten emails for each confirming the transaction. And my order status in my account says 'Shipped'.

Anyway, I'm not too concerned about it because it's not really a book I want that badly. What's of a much larger concern is my nook's inability to see my sideloaded content. I have no idea why that's happening.

[Fbone]

I guess you'll have to call BN like it says.

[geertm]

Originally Posted by afa

No worries, geertm. Thanks for the help.

Fbone - the purchases seem to have gone through. I've gotten emails for each confirming the transaction. And my order status in my account says 'Shipped'.

Anyway, I'm not too concerned about it because it's not really a book I want that badly. What's of a much larger concern is my nook's inability to see my sideloaded content. I have no idea why that's happening.

Have tried my suggestion from post #14 (recover to original firmware) concerning your sideloaded content problem?

[afa]

Good news!

My sideloaded content is now accessible. How? I don't really know. I tried it a dozen times before and it didn't work. Yesterday, I removed all the books from my nook and from Calibre. I then re-added the books to Calibre, re-converted everything to EPUB, and then sent them to my nook 2 or 3 at a time. I don't know if the latter was necessary, but just thought I'd try it.

And it worked! My books are now in "My Documents", and they seem to be working fine. *phew* I think I might know what the problem was. I had initially added the (free) books I downloaded from B&N in my Calibre library, as well, and had edited the metadata to my liking. Maybe that was the problem? Some weird hang-up caused by my trying to sideload books that the nook had already added wirelessly? Anyway, my Calibre library now only contains non-B&N books, just to be safe.

So now I have a couple of other questions:

- Adobe Digital Editions - So what's the deal with ADE? How is it supposed to work? I downloaded it (I have a Mac, by the way) and started it up, and it doesn't seem to have anything besides the ability to read. No option to transfer books (although I only tried with non-DRMed books), no icon for my nook (it didn't tell me anything about recognising my device), no 'File' or 'Edit' or any other menu. Nothing. Just an ADE menu, which has hardly any options to speak of.

- Softroot - Worth it or not worth it?

[geertm]

Originally Posted by afa

Adobe Digital Editions - So what's the deal with ADE? How is it supposed to work? I downloaded it (I have a Mac, by the way) and started it up, and it doesn't seem to have anything besides the ability to read. No option to transfer books (although I only tried with non-DRMed books), no icon for my nook (it didn't tell me anything about recognising my device), no 'File' or 'Edit' or any other menu. Nothing. Just an ADE menu, which has hardly any options to speak of.

Delete the 2 Adobe Digital Editions folders that are on the Nook. After that connect the Nook to your PC while ADE is active, and you should get the question if you want to authorize your Nook. After authorizing your Nook you will see a Nook symbol in ADE.
Adobe DRM books that you buy will be downloaded to the ADE library. From there you can put them on the Nook from within ADE. You can also just drag and drop the file to your Nook (except for library books).

[afa]

Alright, so my nook is recognised by ADE. I have yet to buy any ADE ebooks, so I haven't actually used it.

By the way, I figured out why my ebooks weren't being synced to my nook. For some reason the problem seems to be while transferring PDB books. I have a few books in that format, and when I try to transfer them, the nook basically keeps "Checking for New Content" for ages without actually finding it. But I then converted these same books to EPUB, and the transfer went through without a hitch.

Any idea why that would be the case? The nook is supposed to read PDBs, right? So why are my ebooks not being recognised? It's not really a big issue, admittedly, since I can just convert them, but it would be nice to know.

[afa]

Another couple of questions:

- Is it just me, or do I detect the refresh speed of my e-Ink slowing down? I remember when I first used it, I was quite pleasantly surprised that the page-turn lag wasn't as bad as I had feared. But now that I've loaded several books onto it, it seems to me that the page turns aren't quite as quick as before. It's not a huge difference, maybe it went from half a second to a full second, but I was wondering if this is normal?

- Formatting - I've so far only been reading ebooks that were... 'acquired' through non-ebookstore means. One thing I've noticed is that the formatting doesn't seem to take into account the 'section breaks' that you frequently have in novels. You know, like...

[indent] blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
[indent] blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

[indent] blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
[indent] blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

where the double space between the paragraphs indicates the section break, whether for a different scene or a POV switch. In the ebooks, I've noticed that this break is missing, which results in my reading a paragraph and realising halfway through that the POV has suddenly switched.

Is there some way to correct this? And more importantly, do ebooks downloaded and purchased from stores (whether B&N or WHSmith or ebooks.com or wherever) suffer from this same issue?

[curio]

Originally Posted by afa

- Formatting - I've so far only been reading ebooks that were... 'acquired' through non-ebookstore means. One thing I've noticed is that the formatting doesn't seem to take into account the 'section breaks' that you frequently have in novels. You know, like... [...] where the double space between the paragraphs indicates the section break, whether for a different scene or a POV switch. In the ebooks, I've noticed that this break is missing, which results in my reading a paragraph and realising halfway through that the POV has suddenly switched.

This is likely the result of poor post-processing of scanned and OCRed (automatically text-converted) print material, in the course of which lines tend to get turned into paragraphs, or the result of a bad conversion process from some other text format (e.g., PDF to ePUB).

Originally Posted by afa

Is there some way to correct this? And more importantly, do ebooks downloaded and purchased from stores (whether B&N or WHSmith or ebooks.com or wherever) suffer from this same issue?

There's no solely tool-based process, I'm afraid, because whatever tool was to fix section breaks would need to have a way of distinguishing among regular sentence ends and ends of paragraphs.

If the book in question is an ePUB, you can use an ePUB editor such as Sigil (free) to correct line breaks manually, but this will prove extremely tedious even for a single book because you'll have to essentially process the entire book sentence by sentence and compare it with another format in which paragraphs are evident.

[afa]

Thanks for the reply, curio.

Do you know about ebookstore purchases? If I buy an ebook from one of the big online stores, are those sections properly formatted? Or will they still look the same?

If so, that's a shame. I agree that manually editing and correcting an entire novel (let alone several novels) would be tedious in the extreme.