Introduction
Congratulations on your purchase of the NOOK Color or NOOK, Barnes & Noble’s (simply B&N from here on) ebook readers. The NOOK Color, which debuted in November 2010, is a multitouch VividView color screen. The touchscreen NOOK, which first went on sale in June 2011, features an E Ink reading display that bears a remarkable resemblance to paper.
The NOOK Color resembles a tablet like the iPad or Samsung Galaxy in many ways, but B&N has intentionally focused it as an ereading device without the full set of features to be found in a tablet. This focuses attention on the reading experience of books, newspapers, and magazines while keeping the price down. The NOOK Color is an attempt to balance the features of the tablet with the immersive experience of reading. The NOOK Color can hold approximately 6,000 books out-of-the-box. (The original NOOK can hold approximately 1,500 books.) In other words, if you read one book per week, your NOOK Color can hold enough books for almost 116 years of reading, and if you add a microSD card to your NOOK Color, you can easily hold enough books for many lifetimes!
Tip
Many NOOK Color owners refer to other NOOK Color owners as NOOKies.
This book is intended to give you all the information you need to get the most out of your NOOK Color and the associated supporting applications. You not only learn how to use your NOOK Color and NOOK, but you also learn all the best places to get books and other content. After you’ve learned all the great resources available for books, you’ll quickly find that you need a way to organize your ebooks, so you also learn how to do that using a free tool called Calibre.
By the time you finish this book, you’ll be comfortable with all aspects of your NOOK Color and NOOK. Following are some of the many things you can learn how to do in this book:
• Add your own pictures for use as a wallpaper or screensaver.
• Use the B&N’s unique LendMe feature to lend and borrow books.
• Play music, audiobooks, podcasts, and more.
• Watch video.
• Read your ebooks on your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, computer, Android phone, or Blackberry.
• Get books (many free) from many sources on the Internet and load them onto your NOOK Color and NOOK.
• Manage all your ebooks, and update author and title information if needed.
• Automatically download full-color covers for your books that display on your NOOK Color and NOOK.
• Use your NOOK Color to browse the Web.
• Use your NOOK Color to read enhanced books and children’s books.
• Use highlights, annotations, and bookmarks.
• Learn how to publish your books using B&N’s PubIt feature.
• Install third-party applications on your NOOK Color to add functionality to it.
This book is divided into three parts:
• Part I, “NOOK Color,” focuses exclusively on using the NOOK Color.
• Part II, “NOOK,” focuses on using the NOOK.
• Part III, “Beyond the NOOKs,” focuses on using the NOOK-related apps, Calibre, and B&N’s PubIt.
Mixed in with all this, you can find plenty of tips and tricks to help you get the most from your NOOK Color and NOOK. You can also find a comprehensive list of questions and answers based on questions from actual NOOK Color and NOOK owners.
Note
Writing this book presents a unique challenge. The E Ink NOOK has some limitations with images. Although the images do appear, complex images or images with lots of information can be tedious to see. The NOOK Color, however, presents images in a much better fashion, as do the related NOOK Apps (excepting the Blackberry eReader app). Hence, for all aspects of the NOOK Color and NOOK Apps, the use of images will be more substantial than with the original NOOK chapters.
Throughout this book, you will encounter the terms ebook and NOOK Book. ebook will be used generically. NOOK Books is what B&N calls its version of ebooks that it sells through B&N. These are still ebooks, and NOOK Book is more of a marketing piece, but the distinction is useful because only NOOK Books sync between devices and support social features. Also, only NOOK Books are visible in My NOOK Library on BN.com.
It’s my hope that you don’t have any questions about using your NOOK after reading this book, but if you do, please don’t hesitate to send me email at [email protected]. I’ll gladly help if I can.
Thank you for buying The NOOK Book!