Tablets Compatible With Nook Books
By Richard Gaughan
The Nook is Barnes & Noble's entry into the e-book reader arena. Barnes & Noble's Nook competes with Amazon's Kindle, Sony's eReader and Kobo's eReader Touch — all being convenient, compact devices that can hold a library's worth of books. But what if you want to read Nook Books without a Nook eReader? There are ways to make that happen.
The Nook Book Marketplace
The Nook is an electronic book reader, or e-reader. The Nook allows you to buy electronic versions of books from Barnes & Noble and read them on your device. Those electronic books usually are locked with DRM, which means they contain Digital Rights Management encryption. DRM prevents you from transferring your books from your Nook to other readers. That is the industry's attempt to keep you from buying a book and then passing it on to your friends. Unfortunately, it also keeps you from passing it from one of your devices to another, under normal circumstances.
Reading Nook Books Without a Nook
Barnes & Noble uses cloud storage to keep track of your Nook Book library, which means it's not just your Nook reader that knows what books you have purchased — other devices have access to that information as well. To access that information and read your Nook Books on your other tablet, you'll need to download a free version of the Nook software onto your tablet. At the Barnes & Noble website you can download software for Windows tablets, Android tablets and iPads. The Nook Reader software is also available for smartphones and Mac computers.
Open Access Books
There are thousands of books available without DRM. You can spread those books out across all of your devices that have e-reader software. Barnes & Noble has chosen to use the ePUB standard. This means any ePUB book without DRM can be read by any compatible software package. Unlike the Kindle formats, for example, which require the Kindle reader to display, unlocked ePUBs can be read on any device. The iPad can read ePUBs and the Android store has a handful of good ePUB reading applications available.
Which Tablets Work?
You can find an ePUB reader for every tablet on the market. If you want to read the Nook Books you've bought directly from Barnes & Noble, then you'll need to get a tablet for which Barnes & Noble has a reader available. You'll have no trouble doing that, because Barnes & Noble has a Nook Reader App for Android-powered tablets, iPads and Windows tablets. That covers just about every tablet you'll find.
References
Resources
- How to Get the Most from Your Nook; Adrienne Bischoff
Writer Bio
First published in 1998, Richard Gaughan has contributed to publications such as "Photonics Spectra," "The Scientist" and other magazines. He is the author of "Accidental Genius: The World's Greatest By-Chance Discoveries." Gaughan holds a Bachelor of Science in physics from the University of Chicago.