Rooted a Nook this past week. I'll clear some things up if you want to do it yourself.

[pecosdave]

I was given a $50 Barnes and Noble gift card for Christmas, so I decided to use it on something I could hack.

I went to Barnes and Noble on Monday and plopped down my gift card and an extra $35 for a Nook Simple Touch. I chose this device because it's rather cheap, is notoriously easy to pwn and actually has good reasons to be pwned

Comments

[spiffikins]

I can see that - I guess I have one big roadblock that prevents me from going this route - I don't trust Amazon (nor any other company) to guarantee that the products that I purchased will continue to be available if *they* are storing them.

I have read too many accounts of users who purchased a book, downloaded it to their Kindle, and the next time they let their Kindle connect to the web, Amazon plucked their book right off their ereader and removed it from their bookshelf.

Not to mention, Barnes and Noble has already gotten out of the business of storing ebooks - I had to switch to another provide to get my Nook books a while ago. And when my credit card was stolen, and I had to cancel it, and get a new one issued - if that card is ever removed from my account - I won't be able to read my books, because all my ebooks from B&N have my credit card incorporated into the DRM - which is not only terrible for long term access, but also not something I want included in any files that I might loan to friends using the nook tools to do so.

I guess I see ebooks like music - I bought the CD, and now that I listen to music via mp3, I expect that I can rip the song off the CD and convert it to that format. In the future, if I need a different format, I should be able to go back to the original media I purchased, and convert it to the new format.

To me that is the entire POINT of digital media - future proofing it. And so far, none of the providers have gotten to this point.

Not to mention - technology is supposed to make life *easier* - and I can't think of anything more annoying than trying to keep track of which book is available in which program on my ereader :D