More ereader adventures
I’m sort of an omnivore in terms of where I buy books from. At least I was when I purchasing physical books. When I purchases a Nook, I sort of got myself in a situation where I was more limited in terms of what I could buy from where. But this week, I got an advertisement from Borders saying their were selling ebooks in cooperation with Kobo. This peaked my interest because I always like to have choices. So I went the Borders site and the the Kobo site and did some reading.
It seems that Kobo books are EPUBs that use Adobe Digital Editions DRM. The same DRM that the Overdrive public library books use. I reasoned that if I could read the Overdrive books on the Nook that I SHOULD be able to read the Kobo and Borders books. All I had to was try it out. Luckily I was able to find a free ebook on the Kobo site, which I was able to successful download and use on the Nook. Bolstered by this success I purchased an ebook and was able to successfully load it on the Nook with Adobe Digital Editions. Yippee! The big downside with these is that they live in the My Documents section of the Nook, separate from all the Barnes and Noble ebooks. Also you can’t make the purchase from the Nook itself. Neither of these are deal breakers for me and since Kobo sometimes has good deals, I’m now subscribed to their RSS feed to see what new stuff might come up. I’ve already gotten two books for free that I’d like to have so I’m pretty psyched.
I’d love it if Amazon would let me buy ebooks that would work on the Nook. I have an Amazon credit card and get reward gift certificates from that. Because I can’t use this for ebooks I’ve been using a different card that I can get Barnes and Noble gift certificates as rewards instead. It seems that Amazon might be shooting itself in the foot with me since there ereader didn’t impress me. Yet another reason by content and container need to be decoupled. Which is why the Kobo approach seems to make sense. Only time will tell if they are successful. Maybe Barnes and Noble should follow suit too. After all their reader appears to work with EPUBs already and people could then use their content on any of the Kobo devices.
Be sure to check out eBookPie as an option too. [Full disclosure - I am co-founder of eBookPie]
We are an agnostic site, and are not tied to any one device, so you should be able to read ebooks from our site on whatever device (minus the Kindle and iPad) you choose.
If EPUB is all you need, it means you can buy most books from http://www.ebooks.com/, too, right? That should widen your range.
Before the Nook or Kindle came along, I was buying ebooks from http://www.ereader.com & reading them on my smartphone. I had over 100 titles by the time I purchased by Nook. Now I have those 100+ titles on my Nook on the My Documents section but only about 25 titles that I’ve actually purchased from Barnes & Noble. So having the separate sections doesn’t bother me. Options, options — that’s what we have with an ereader that can accept a variety of formats!
Check this out, http://www.epubbooks.com/buy-epub-books. Also there is a Kobo app for iPhone.
HOW did you get the books from your Kobo (Border’s library) to the Nook library on the PC? I have a few free books I was trying to move to my Nook and can’t seem to do it…
First, plug in the Nook into the computer. Second, open Adobe Digital Editions which is what the books download into (at least for me). You’ll see the books in Adobe Digital Editions. You’ll also see the Nook in it. Drag and drop the books on to the Nook in Adobe Digital Editions. Close Adobe Digital Editions. Eject the Nook. When you power it up go into My Library > My Documents and check for new content. The things you just loaded should be there.