A New Way to Download ePub NOOKBooks from Barnes and Noble

Back in September, Barnes and Noble removed the ability to download DRM'd ePubs directly from their site. If you are still using NOOK for PC or NOOK for Mac, you might be able to use them to download your newly purchased books and then find the ePubs in some obscure directory on your machine. However, that doesn't help Linux users. Moreover, those Desktop apps are not supported anymore, and so it is not an ideal solution.

So what do you do? If you have an Android device (in principle, you could use an Android emulator as well), you can download the NOOK e-reader Android app and, through a few steps, get the same ePubs you used to download. Here's how you do it:

1. Download and install the NOOK e-reader Android app on your Android device
2. Open the NOOK e-reader app and find your library with your newly purchased book
3. Select "Download" to cache the book locally on the device, and wait for the download to finish
4. Once the download is finished, open a file manager application like ES File Explorer and navigate to
   /sdcard/Nook/content
   You should find your NOOK book ePubs in that folder. That is, find the Nook folder in your internal storage, and then find the content folder inside it.
5. You can use your file manager to copy those ePubs out of that folder, or you can "Share" them to another installed app like Dropbox or Google Drive so that you can easily get them on other devices or your Desktop computer

Once you have the ePubs on another device, you can do whatever you used to do with them when you could download them directly from the NOOK library on-line in your web browser.

[ Side note: You might try to plug your Android device into your computer and use MTP to access /sdcard/Nook/content directly from your Desktop and copy files out of it. However, it's possible that the ePubs won't be accessible this way. In fact, the might not even show up in the file listing. So you might be stuck using a file manager on your device. ]

Someone asked me for some references on LaTeX today...

I got an e-mail today asking for some recommended references on LaTeX. Here is my response, which is a marked-up paste of an e-mail.

[ This post can also be found on my web page. ]

The reference that I keep handy is:

The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition by Mittelbach and Goosens

That reference, often called TLC2, is a standard one. You really can't
go wrong with it. It's dense, includes lots of examples, and is pretty
easy to use. One other book that came in handy when I started drawing
graphics in LaTeX is:

The LaTeX Graphics Companion by Goosens, Rahtz, and Mittelbach

That introduced me to things like picture environments and PSTricks. I
use PSTricks a lot now, and the book really is only meant to be an
introduction (albeit a nice one) to PSTricks as well as other competing
(and complementary) tools. Now I typically use the PSTricks
documentation on the PSTricks home page at TUG (you can google for
"PStricks" to find the web page).

A nice small reference to LaTeX is:

LaTeX: A Document Preparation System by Lamport

A very complete but also intimidating reference for TeX is:

The TeXbook by Knuth

Three other notable and popular books on TeX (that are far less
intimidating) are:

• TeX for the Impatient by Abrahams, Berry, and Hargreaves
• A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy
• TeX by Topic: A TeXnician's Reference by Eijkhout

You can still get that last book in print from some sources that print
out of print books (lulu.com), but I believe it has been released for free as a PDF as well. Yes, see:

http://eijkhout.net/texbytopic/texbytopic.html

for the free download link (released under GNU FDL).

[ If you really don't want to get into the nitty gritty details, I would
recommend sticking to the LaTeX references. ]

Otherwise, I've just done a lot of learning by doing. It helped to
learn about typesetting in general. A good reference for both things is
the documentation that comes with the memoir package:

• Package: http://ctan.org/pkg/memoir
• Documentation: http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.pdf

That documentation link (memman.pdf) is an excellent introduction to all
of the basic typographical elements of a book... and memoir is a nice
LaTeX package in general.

After that, see comp.text.tex (available as a Google group) which is
known simply as "CTT" to insiders...

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/

LaTeX and TeX experts watch that group and will answer your questions
about how to do things. You can also search the group for some previous
answers to similar questions. You can also see announcements of new
versions of packages that do cool things. It's a great resource.

Finally, seeing the LaTeX 2e source (implemented in TeX) can be helpful
to understand exactly what goes on when you do things like a \section.
"source2e.pdf" is included with the LaTeX distribution. You can also
view it on-line here:

http://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/doc/latex/base/source2e.pdf

That includes all of the TeX implementations for the LaTeX macros and
gives you some idea of what goes on when you build a LaTeX document.

Off the top of my head, that's all I can think of. Just go into things
thinking that LaTeX probably *CAN* do whatever you want it to (including
solving and plotting differential equations, which pure LaTeX (as
opposed to PDFLaTeX) can do). Like a sculptor, you just have to figure
out what to chip away to get it to do it. Keep trying things until
something is qualitatively similar to what you want, and then tune
(perhaps with the help of CTT) after that. Eventually you'll come up
with better and better implementations. If you come up with something
especially novel, post it on-line. In fact, contributing to CTAN
directly is usually recommended.

Another thing that helps me is to remember that TeX is really is just a
giant machine that tokenizes, parses, and expands. It's not a
"programming language" so much as it is a text "filter" in that a single
run of LaTeX doesn't necessarily result in what you want. Keeping this
in the back of my head helps me anticipate the problems I might have
with certain approaches, and it further helps me figure out how to
approach LaTeX in order to succeed.

Installing Adobe Digital Editions on Linux with Wine

UPDATE: I have not had time to address the download issues some people have had when trying to install ADE. However, see the comments on this post for some additional tips on where to find an ADE installer download that you can run inside Wine.

Unfortunately, Adobe does not provide a simple download link for the Windows version of Digital Editions, and so if you want to purchase a PDF or ePub e-book with Adobe ADEPT DRM protection, it is very difficult to get up and running on Linux even if you have Wine installed. Here's how I did it.

1. Install Wine on your system. Most Linux distributions provide Wine as an optional install (e.g., sudo yum install wine from the command line on Fedora).
2. You will need Gecko extensions available to run the iexplore.exe web browser that comes with Wine. Visit the Wine Wiki's Gecko page for information on how to install Gecko. Your Linux distribution may have a "wine-gecko" package. If it doesn't, then follow the simple instructions on the Wine Wiki.
3. You will also need Adobe Flash installed on your Wine system, and so you should visit the Wine Wiki's Flash page to get the install_flash_player.exe download link. Download the exe and run it in Wine (e.g., wine install_flash_player.exe from the command line).
4. Now, start the iexplore.exe browser bundled with Wine. After I ran Wine for the first time, it setup a .wine directory in my home directory (i.e., ~/.wine). I found the iexplore.exe in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Internet Explorer. Change to that directory and run iexplore.exe (e.g, wine iexplore.exe from the command line).
5. Now you can visit the Digital Editions installer (which is written in Flash). From the Wine Internet Explorer, enter in the URL:

   http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/ade_web_library.swf

   That should startup a little installer. Follow the prompts to download and install Digital Editions. You will even be able to launch it from there.
   • The installer will install the single Digital Editions executable to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Adobe Digital Editions as digitaleditions.exe.
   • You can run it again but executing that file through wine (e.g., wine digitaleditions.exe from the command line in that directory)
   • Alternatively, you can use the "Digital Editions" shortcuts that the installer probably placed on your desktop.
6. Once Digital Editions is started, you should be able to drag-and-drop ACSM files you've downloaded from e-Book commerce sites (like Google Books), and it should download the Adept-DRM'd version of your media.
   • DRM'd books are stored in the My Digital Editions folder that will be created in your home directory.
   • If you want to put them elsewhere, you need to edit the symbolic links in ~/.wine/drive_c/users/USERNAME where USERNAME is your Linux username. The My Documents folder was symlinked to my home directory by default. I got rid of the symlink and created a real directory there instead, but you could point the symlink somewhere else if you'd rather. Regardless, the My Digital Editions folder will reside inside the My Documents folder (alongside a My Books folder, but I don't know what gets put in there... maybe non-DRM stuff you put into ADE?).

Once you have your DRM'd books, you should be able to transfer them onto devices that have also been authorized with your Adept key (e.g., a Sony Reader that has been authorized with the same account you used inside Digital Editions). I suppose it's possible to get the Digital Editions running inside Wine to notice when your reader is connected, but I haven't tried it (that might involve installing the Sony Reader Library software within Wine, and I received some ugly errors when I tried to do that (but YMMV)).

Safari Books On-line: Searchable TLC2

Check out Safari Books Online:

• http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/

It's pretty pricey to pay for a login, but requests that come from many universities (or libraries?) get a free login automatically. For example, from outside OSU, I can use my OSU login at:

• http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/

That is, I added ".proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu" to the end of the server name, which forces the request through the OSU library's proxy server.

There are lots of useful digital copies of reference books on-line. I think all of the O'Reilly books are available. More importantly (to me), you can find a digital (and searchable) copy of The LaTeX Companion (Second edition) by Mittelbach and Goossens. You can even copy and paste code samples directly out of the book!