Back in June, I reviewed the Barnes and Noble Nook eReader. See the bottom of this post for an update on that review, in which I wrote:
The most important advantage of the Nook over the Kindle to me is its native support for the ePub format. Mostly I read public domain classics in western letters as well as Austrian and proto-Austrian works. There is an abundance of the former available in ePub at Project Gutenberg as well as other sites, and an ever-growing stock the latter available here in the Mises.org Literature section.
Now this is my biggest gripe about the Nook.
While there is a search function and a “coverflow” feature for the Nook’s library of books that are downloaded from the Barnes and Noble web site (the “My B&N Library”), there are no such functions for the books you get from other sources (which are stored in the “My Documents” section of the Nook). You have to manually flip through pages listing all your books each time you want to switch from one book to another. This is a big pain in the neck for anybody who wants to stock their Nook with hundreds (or even just dozens) of books from other sources. I’m dealing with this restriction by getting as many free classics as possible from the B&N store (just search for what you want and then sort by price to find all the free stuff) and by carefully organizing all my non-B&N PDFs and ePubs in a folder on my computer, loading only the handful of books that I’m most interested in at the time on my Nook, and periodically changing that mix according to my evolving interests. Having to do this with files consisting mostly of text, on a gadget that can hold 2 Gigabytes, for want of a simple search function, is frankly ridiculous; hopefully Barnes and Noble will fix this in a software update soon.
I’m happy to report that consumer sovereignty has held sway, and Barnes and Noble has indeed added a search function that works for ePub and PDF books in the most recent Nook software update. This has revolutionized my eReading experience. Now my Nook is packed with a vast abundance of great literature. All my favorite writers and thinkers are in there, and each work is just a search term away: Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristotle, Cicero, Polybius, Tacitus, Ovid, Spinoza, Hume, Voltaire, Say, Bastiat, Mises, Hazlitt, Woods, Murphy, Tucker, Kinsella, Gordon, Klein, French, DiLorenzo, et cetera. What’s more, B&N has also added a “Shelves” function for organizing your eBooks. So, I created a highly useful “Nightstand” shelf for the 3 or 4 books I’m focusing on at any given time.
With the Nook, the free resources provided at Mises.org and other sites (like Project Gutenberg and ManyBooks.net), and the low-price, high-quality live instruction offered online at the Mises Academy, it’s never been easier to provide oneself with a world-class education.
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Don’t forget that the Online Library of Liberty is free, has over a 1000 titles in it so far and is handily organized. http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=149
All titles have .pdf versions.
There’s more there than a working man can read in a lifetime.
For the Kindle user, there is freeware called Calibre that can convert the Mises.org ePub books. It also does good work with Google ePub books.
Can anyone recommend a good application to convert .PDF to ePUB?
Richard, a lot of people swear by Calibre for that. Myself, I use the Stanza desktop app.
Well, I am a bit hesitant to call it “good”, but calibre more-or-less works. If you have linux, it may already be available via the distribution directly. If you have a PDF that is based on images rather than text (as many of those on mises.org are), I posted a mini-howto here. That will OCR the images from PDF into a text file. Once you have the text file, calibre can make it into an ebook. I tried it with output to mobi but it should work with epub too.
Now, there is another thing you can do, convert it into audiobooks. I used cepstral (and thereafter lame and mp3splt). Apart from cepstral, the software is free of charge. Cepstral charges about 30$ for a voice, and that’s money well spent. If you are familiar with the xtranormal videos, they sound like the Cepstral voices. Cepstral provides demo voices so you can try them before buying (they randomly add phrases like “please register me” into the spoken text). I selected “Lawrence”, that sounded most pleasant.
Thanks J. and Peter…
ePub capability was the reason I chose the Sony Reader over the Kindle (additionally, while I’ve been generally satisfied with Barnes & Noble, I didn’t want to tie myself to a retailer because the vast majority of my e-reading is old stuff from Gutenberg or elsewhere).
Hi Ken. Like I say in the post, the Nook natively supports ePub, and it’s perfectly compatible with Gutenberg.
Epub can easily be converted to Mobi with a program called Calibre.
Another advantage of the NookColor is that it runs Android. This means that you can install other e-reading software. For example, I have the Kindle software and Aldiko installed on my Nook. Not to mention being able to browse the web and read articles on Muses.org, etc.
I, too, was really glad when they fix the search function with the latest Nook firmware upgrade. With several hundred books in the “My Documents” section of my Nook, it was too agonizing to go through, a page at a time, to try to find the one i wanted to read. Now I can just search on a keyword from the title, or the author’s name, and am instantly transported to my target. The Nook is fun to use again!
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