Sun_Cat wrote:
You know, even though I obviously don't feel a lot of loyalty to B&N, knowing what I now know I would still buy a Nook Simple Touch because I think it has the best ergonomics of any available ereader. (Only now I would get the glowlight, which wasn't available when I got my NST.)
What I really want is a lightweight, high contrast, daylight readable tablet. When I show my rooted NST to friends, they tend to say it's near perfect. The eInk display is the best thing going currently, but the flicker and slow refresh is definitely noticeable. It works well for reading. I suspect it won't be long before this market gets targeted by a hardware manufacturer looking to fill a niche.
I deplore B&N's lack of reasonable software development and lack of responsiveness here, but the reader program is adequate for my needs as it is. And I don't have to buy a single book from B&N if I don't want to (and I usually don't).
The B&N reader is "good", but hardly at the best-in-class level I'd expect from a company that should be focused on making the best reader possible.
If they would only improve the shelving and the dictionary, I'd be a much happier camper. I know there are some solutions (or more like work toward solutions) over on XDA-Developers, but they all require rooting and I'm not all that interested.
B&N should really take some lessons from (or simply acquire) Mantano. The Mantano Reader works across all my NOOK devices (rooted, of course) as well as my Android devices. The interface and feature set is consistent between devices, with a few costmetic variations based on the underlying OS (Android version -- 2.1 elair on the NST, 2.2 foyo on the NC, 2.3 gingerbread on the NT and 4.0 ICS on the samsung). I can load the dictionary of my choosing. Multi-language support is available. Reading position and library organization sync between devices. PDF and epub reading function near identically. With a few menu and contrast display glitches on the monochrome NST display fixed, it would be ideal.
One of these days I'm going to fiddle around to see whether something could be cobbled together to create shelves from Calibre and push them onto the NST with ClockWorkMod Recovery. (That's an alternate recovery mode boot from the sdcard that doesn't require rooting.) I suspect that it probably can be done.
Pretty close. On NST, someone has developed scripts to directly manipulate the B&N databases on the device. You boot the "noogie" image off of uSD to make the normally-hidden B&N partitions available to your desktop computer. The scripts read the SQLite database off the device. I believe the scripts will automatically create shelves based on author. You could modify them to do anything else you like with a bit of coding.
The limitation is that the B&N software is so bloody awful under the hood. From what I've understood of postings over on XDA, there are TWO databases responsible for book info. These getting out of sync is what causes the "page 1" problem on the NST, and a myriad of other problems. Metadata embedded in epub files is not used, which is why you only see summary data for B&N-purchased titles. You could use these scripts to automate entering a lot of initial data, but there's no guarantee the B&N software won't break it all.
