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. ]

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)).

The Quick Reference Site (Cards and Books)

UPDATE 3: I did find the source of that regular expression card at Gordon McKinney's Pro IT Blog. Well, it's not a LaTeX source, but it's at least in letter format.

UPDATE 2: I found another good list of quick reference cards at the plantOzh blog. It includes a a regexp card, Perl 5 booklet, and CSS cards (1.0, 2.0). Yes, these cards are archived at the blog, so all of the commentary below still applies.

UPDATE 1: It's also annoying when someone simply archives existing quick reference cards because sometimes those archives use A4 paper. If these were linked to their origins, the source code (perhaps LaTeX) might be available, making a conversion to letter paper easy.

Lately, I have been quick reference happy [1, 2, 3, 4]. I cannot explain why, but I suddenly want to surround myself with quick references.

I think I found a great new quick reference resource. It's The Quick Reference Site, which features quick reference cards, e-books, and other papers and tutorials. From the site:

Throughout the years I have collected a huge pile of documents that deal with almost every aspect of software development. The purpose of this site is to centralize this information and to make it available to everyone who may need it or shares my passion on this subject. There are still a lot of documents in my "archive" that I like to share with you all.
At the moment this site represents only a fraction of what I want to provide, so a lot of work still needs to be done. As a result, you should consider this site as a work in progress. I'll try to keep you updated on the most challenging, powerful and continuously evolving software technologies of the moment. I hope that especially Java and C++ fanatics (like myself) will find some valuable information over here.

As far as I can tell so far, the author archives quick references that he has found over time and links us, the readers, to those archives. The advantage of this is that it minimizes the chances of broken links. The disadvantage is that the archives may not be the most recent versions. Additionally, if this site ever goes down and our bookmarks point there, those bookmarks will be broken.

Some quick reference cards that I want to point out (if you go to his list, you can also read descriptions of these programs):

• Cascading Style Sheets 1.0


• CVS Quick Reference Card
• CVS Quick Reference Card (LG)


• PHP Cheat Sheet
• PHP 4 Reference Card


• The One Page Linux Manual
• UNIX commands reference card


• AMSTeX Reference Card 1.3


• vi Reference Card (HP)
• Vi Reference Card
• vi Quick Reference
• VIM Quick Reference Card


• GNU Calc Reference Card


• Bash Quick Reference


• LINUX System Call Quick Reference
• LINUX Admin Quick Reference


• Subversion Quick Reference Card
• Cheat Sheet Subversion


• MySQL-4.02a

So, that's fun.

On a slightly unrelated note, you can also check out Hawk Wings to find a QuickSilver quick reference and the QuickSilver user manual.