What I hate about this is when you buy hardware, you expect to own it. This is just like Apple products. “If you can’t hack it, you don’t own it”

@Henrik-I agree, but the difficulties placed in your way when hacking hardware like this do make the task more interesting right? Hopefully the day will come when you really do own what you pay for, but in the meantime at least this common business model gives us some good exciting challenges to overcome.

There is good news; at least you can have physical access to the eeprom and possibly do enhancements like a custom socket or replacing the chip all together with a mcu with multiple firmware images to choose from etc …. it is less of a problem and more of a interesting hardware /software challenge.
Which in this case has me seconding Nemo and the article writer Ken have kindly and positively pointed out.
I for one think the nook is a waste as a commercial-only web appliance for e-book drivel or the out dated concept like DRM etc.
no one really wants to have a half owned device or a service that caters to part ownership of media that once read is now useless unless transferable to another entity…Blah!!
any ways I am eager to see what comes of this development.

nice to see them offering something without a 3g plan. i would buy it if it was a little more powerful RAM/GHZ wise, larger, microSDHC, and capable of accepting a nice custom ROM. reading ebooks on my phone really blows and i see the cpu speed is the same, the ram unmentioned, and up to 2gb flash memory, which may or may not be used as RAM as well? sounds like it would suck, besides the battery life which sounds pretty nice.

for someone who this doesnt effect you sure have your panties in a bunch. learn some grammer

now if i could figure out my outdated mobile device id be good to go

where can i find this “buy a commercial product and use it as intended by the manufacturer-a-day”?
it sounds AWESOME

Have to agree on the “you buy the hardware, you own it to do whatever you want with it” ideal, the only device so far I have I want to do an upgrade/fix to is my old Archos AV500, still a very nice unit but the harddrive developed a couple of errors on it just outside of warranty, but Archos are behaving like all the other major companies out there by locking the unit so you can’t replace the drive yourself.
I even contacted Archos to try and pay them to replace it but didn’t get a response, this was when the AV500 was still around and still popular.

Never intending on buying another Archos device ever again.

They’re all bastards.

Hacking community is like 0.1% of the nook customer base. NO advantage to have an easily hackable device.

Oh, and my miceowaves MCU is not open source or flashable, so i guess I dont own it?

Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been dithering over which ebook reader to get, but have been unconvinced by them all. We (the whole family rabble) were literally about to decent on B&N. Rooting this was important to be able to replace the garbage book selection and its atom thick scroll bar.

As Haku says above “they’re all bastards”.

I know this is hack a day, it’s just that this post is more like I didn’t manage to hack but who cares ill make a post anyway. I think you guys missed my point anyway.

@Caleb, i didn’t realise this was grammar a day, and at least i didn’t look like a dick double posting.

I didn’t start the flame war. But come on guy’s sure this isn’t the best post on hack-a-day. But at-lest it did tell people not to hack it if they had one, and it doesn’t have a Arduino. so it could be worse.

The security on this is weak, someone will get passed this.

“If you can’t hack it, you don’t own it”

Big corporate manufacturers are just getting started, wait till we see something like PS3 has without the RAM dumping and accessible encryption oracles. It’ll start taking chip hacking. PS3 even in it’s current state is secure from piracy and any custom content. Same for new x360 and old ones on some level.

it is probably a drm thing to prevent being able to extract the books into text form than to prevent running unsigned software

Millions of people bought DRMed music from companies that went under.

B&N stock is 1/3 of what it was 4 years ago.

Some of the Nook ebooks are as much as $648 on sale.

Everyone who buys DRM deserves to get ripped off.

@Caleb

“for someone who this doesnt effect you sure have your panties in a bunch. learn some grammer”

This is rich… three grammar errors and two spelling errors in your rant.

is the NAND boot block encrypted by ROM loader or something? What’s so hard about this..there isn’t any hardware isolation.

I don’t own any of these devices by the way.

@xorpunk No. On the old models the boot device was a microSD internal to the casing. There was no NAND part. This was great because you could dd the filesystems plus the boot block at the end of the SD card to your PC and be able to rebuild the SD card after any disaster. But when they decided to move to NAND, presumably for cost savings, the default recovery scheme was lost.

Nobody has tried looking for JTAG or the boot source select pins yet so not all is lost.

So could a hacked nook be used to get free 3G browsing anywhere with 3G coverage? O:

Maybe this is just a cost-saving measure. A hardwired chip is cheaper than an microSD and a card holder.

Picked up a new nook last night. SN is 10032 running 1.4.1. Waiting for word, don’t want to have to return it. I’m am a bit peeved they didn’t inform me of the removal of the SD slot. This alone would be grounds for return I guess, since it was a factor in my decision.

@ tommy there used to be 2 micro sd slots one internal and one under the battery cover for extra storage yours no longer has the one inside the unit which the os runs on. DO NOT ATTEMPT to root yours as you will brick it. luckily for me i exchanged mine today for a bad older unit from dec 09 and got a 10030 with 1.4.0 and was able to root it just fine!!

You think you have it bad. I have over 1400 books on my Nook. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to root, I would never have been able to find titles I wanted (I tend to read 10-15 at a time). I was ready to switch to Kindle just to get a little file management. I cannot believe B&N has such a crap database system. The first database I used on an Osborne was better than this. Have they learned nothing in all these years??

Glad to see there’s some progress on the 1003′s as I just got one myself. I’m not good enough to start messing with hardware roots, but will patiently wait until it gets down to a software-only level and gleefully take control of the device I paid for, own, and should damn well be able to do what I want with.