Goodbye-Barnes-and-Noble

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 20:54:46 -0700

Goodbye Barnes & Noble

I've read books on electronic devices for many years now; the convenience of having a huge library with me while traveling makes up for the lower quality of the presentation. I've read books on a selection of Palm devices, an old OpenInkpot compatible ereader, my phone and, most recently, on my Kobo Aura.

To get reading material, I've used a variety of sources, including the venerable Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, directly from authors like Cory Doctorow and even our local Multnomah County Public Library.

I like to have books in epub format; it's a published standard, based on HTML and CSS. My recent devices have all happily supported that, and it allows for editing when I feel the need to correct typos or formatting problems.

Purchasing Books

When I wanted to actually purchase a book, I bought from Barnes & Noble; they have a good selection, and reasonable automatic recommendations. According to their web site, since I started shopping there, I've purchased 51 books. I can't tell how much I've spent, but probably in excess of $500.

Not knowing which device I'd be reading on at any one time, and liking to have the assurance of ongoing access to my library, I would always download the epub files to my laptop and then transfer them to whichever device I wanted to read on. This ensured that my books would be available even when I didn't have a network connection (as happened yesterday during a wind storm which cut the power to the DSLAM which connects me to the internet).

I'd created a simple shell script which captured the file after it was downloaded on my laptop and prepared it for my reader. A bit of browser configuration and it really was as simple as clicking the 'download' button to get a book onto both my laptop and my reading device.

Barnes & Noble Disables Downloading

I was traveling in Bordeaux a couple of weeks ago and wanted to get the latest volume in a series I was reading. My library didn't have it available, and so I decided that it was worth a few dollars to purchase it for the flight home.

After clicking through the Barnes & Noble store, I was ready to download the book so that I could transfer it to my reader. Going to 'My Library', I found my new purchases but the usual 'Download' button was missing. I was a bit surprised as I'd purchased and downloaded the previous volume just before leaving without any troubles.

At first, I assumed there was some kind of region restriction on the distribution of this book. I'm familiar with that from DVD region locking of movies, and supposed that the same could be done with books for some reason. However, after setting up a VPN back to home and browsing through that (to ensure that my browser would appear with an Oregon address), the download button was still not present.

The unhelpful Barnes & Noble representative that I accessed through the 'help' button disclosed that the 'download' "feature" had been disabled for "security" reasons.

Not really having any alternative, I requested a refund for the new book.

Barnes & Noble Loses a Customer

With no way to actually use ebooks purchased through the Barnes & Noble store, I won't be spending any more money with them.

I'm not sure how that helps their "security" issues, although if they lose enough customers and they close their doors, I guess that would make them about as secure as imaginable.

Kobo Makes a Sale

Having purchased a Kobo Aura, it had built-in access to their book store, which made it easy to download the book that I wanted. Then, I simply connected my reader to my laptop and copied the file over for safe keeping.

Buying Books under Linux

After I got home, I had to figure out how to get Adobe Digital Editions installed on my laptop. Fortunately, I discovered that version 2.0.1 runs fine under wine.

Now, purchasing books can be done with my laptop (a vastly superior browsing experience). The .acsm file can be dragged straight from the iceweasel download menu to Adobe Digital Editions, which happily downloads the actual .epub file and makes it available for transferring to my reader.

Of course, now that I've got Adobe Digital Editions working, I can also get digitally restricted books from all over the net, greatly expanding my options for purchasing (or borrowing) books. It's a bit less convenient, and requires that I run an icky Windows binary under wine, but at least I have choices, which is some consolation.