Free e-Reader

If you haven't seen the new Kobo reader it's quite a deal for the price of $150 and may be a good choice for someone that is interested in an inexpensive e-Reader.  They expect the price is likely to be under $100 by end of year. They are giving away free eReaders in a new contest. If you were thinking about getting an e-Book deal at Kobobooks for your nook every purchase gets you an entry to win a Kobo Reader.

Click Here to Enter the Kobobooks Contest!

Free e-Book

This week B&N has another Free book, The Shop on Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber. If you enjoy books about female friendships you might want to check it out. I'm a mystery/adventure sort so I'll be passing on this one!

Free Comics for the nook

Today is also "Free Comic Book Day" and you can download free comic books in PDF formatthat will work on your nook.

Read for free in-store

if you haven't tried "Read-in-Store" on your latest nook update give it a spin. Grab a cup of Joe at the coffee spot and read free for an hour at your local B&N.

Free Feed Reader for nook

Last, but not least, is a new free RSS reader site, "NookFeed", optimized for the nook. It uses some clever navigation tricks to let you control reading the feeds from the color screen but displaying the feed on the eInk screen. I think it's a neat idea, but would rather see a regular app for this. Check it out - it's free!

Almost since I first updated to the 1.3 firmware I started having battery problems - almost.  A while back I tried the nookdev trick to install some of the nookdev applications like Nook Library (a.k.a. My Books).  To be honest, this free application is quite a bit superior to the B&N "My Library". It puts all of your books in one view, cover flow (I never use), and far better management tools in my opinion.  

After I found out 1.3 didn't do much for my nook issues, I went ahead and switched over to the nookdev version of 1.3.  Unfortunately, a few of the apps didn't work properly for 1.3 and I failed to check.  Some of these application conflicts seem to have caused my battery drains (I guess background threads stealing the battery even in sleep mode?). The latest version of Nook Launcher and My Books appear to have fixed the problem.  I had a steady battery loss that is no longer occurring. 

There were only a few people having this problem which led me to believe it was something about my nookdev setup. This is the kind of stuff you run into when you go off the vendor supported path; that's ok by me.

How to fix? Use Trok to get the newest versions or use adb to uninstall/reinstall.  Here are the command I executed with adb:

./adb uninstall com.nookdevs.launcher 
./adb install -r  nookLauncher.apk  
./adb uninstall com.nookdevs.library 
./adb install -r  nookLibrary.apk 

Hope that helps the other 15-20 of us with the problem :)

Wow, I found something really useful in the otherwise disappointing 1.3 update! Free book reading! 

Here's how it worked for me.  I connected to the store network normally and I received a pop up welcome message.  It said, "Read eBooks for free. You can read many eBooks for up to one hour each day.  Find items in your nook's Shop then tap Read In Store".

Notice the word "MANY".  The first couple books I tried did not have the "read in store" option.  I then found one book and started reading it.  Every page or two it says, "Loading Page" - and pauses.  That's how they control the reading time by checking you every few page turns (smart idea).  You don't seem to have many reading options in this mode - no navigation with table of contents or footnotes.  You also can't do bookmarks, or notes until you buy the book (pretty expected). The first book locked up hard after a few pages so I cancelled and tried another book which seemed to work flawlessly.  Yes, I did try when I got home and it just hung on "Loading Page"

Interesting items:

- Store has a new menu option, "Recently Read in Store", which makes it easy to continue reading previously read books. Nice.
- The "Shop" icon has a "In Store" ribbon on it in the launcher. Cute.
- Not all books are available. I didn't see a 1:1 correlation with "Lend Me" items.

That make the 1.3 update worth it?