Sharing quotes not allowed from books transferred from PC

[MySacredAsia]

This is strange - I cannot share quotes from transferred books. For example there are books that I've bought from other sites or I have some documents that I personally created on my PC. When I transfer them on the Nook I cannot share - the "Share" button is inactive. You may say that it's a DRM thing, but here's the example - a book purchased from the B&N store through my Nook can share quotes and, the same book purchased and downloaded from the B&N through my PC, then transferred to my NOOK cannot share quotes. I hope that this problem will be solved in an upcoming update, because it seems that I am restricted to buying books from B&N only if I want to share quotes (which doesn't sound very Noble )

Anyway, is there a workaround for this?

[Sun_Cat]

I wasn't aware of this restriction but I'm not surprised to hear about it. I doubt that there's a workaround. The one time I tried out the "share" feature, I discovered that what it really shares is an advertisement, with link, to buy the book at B&N.

I don't blame B&N particularly for doing this. They are in business to make a buck. But I'm not about to inflict it on my friends, so I don't use the feature.

It would be nice if they would extend sharing to non-B&N material, and it would be nice if they allowed us to opt out of the advertising aspect of the share, but I'm not holding my breath.

[RHWright]

Without some major revamping of how content is handled in your account online/My Nook, I don't think this is technically possible.

The whole "share" concept runs through My Nook, it's not a direct link to posting on Facebook, for example. It needs info about the book in your account to share it.

When you sideload, even titles you've downloaded from B&N, it doesn't have the necessary data to share on those books.

This would be a major revamp for very little upside, other than that your friends might also purchase it from B&N. But so much of what people have sideloaded is either PD content (from, say, Gutenberg) or otherwise free/unavailable to buy. So little upside.

So it's not a DRM thing, it's an account structure thing, as far as I can tell.

Kindle has similar functions, I think. Any dual Nook-Kindle owners care to chime in on the similarities/differences between the two?

[MySacredAsia]

Yes, it seems that sharing is not just pure sharing, but sort of an advertisement for the book itself. Ok I am calm now - yet, the most important thing I took this reader for is reading books, isn't it

[fjrichman]

I personally think it's silly, it wouldn't take an overhaul of the account for them to share with their advertisements with people. At least not with books that have proper metadata ISBN etc. They'd just have to run the metadata through a search and then could display their own book info for it.

The thing is they won't because they don't really want to support sideloaded books the thought being if you sideload a book then you didn't buy it from them. So therefore they see no profit from making things work for sideload.

[MacMcK1957]

Metadata on sideloaded content can be pretty inconsistent.  May not even have ISBNs.  You can sideload your kid's fifth grade essay.  What would the program do if you try to share part of it?

[fjrichman]

For things without a ISBN for example or your kids "essay" it should treat  it like a normal FB share without the advertisements, or if they must, throw in a "Shared from the Nook Simple Touch, get yours here" Though ideally if they were going to update the sharing feature for sideloaded books we could disable the entire advetisement bit.

[bklvr896]

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fjrichman wrote:

I personally think it's silly, it wouldn't take an overhaul of the account for them to share with their advertisements with people. At least not with books that have proper metadata ISBN etc. They'd just have to run the metadata through a search and then could display their own book info for it.

The thing is they won't because they don't really want to support sideloaded books the thought being if you sideload a book then you didn't buy it from them. So therefore they see no profit from making things work for sideload.

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The only problem with this is that most BN eBooks have a different ISBN that eBooks purchased from other sources such as Sony or Kobo.  So to find their copy of the book, they'd have to have some type of cross reference system.

And yes, they want you to buy the books from them, it makes sense that you'd have more features available when you buy the book directly from BN.