Why I Rooted–and Then Unrooted–My Nook

On Thursday night, I decided to follow the instructions on Nook Devs to root my eInk Nook. I was interested in the functionality that Trook, one of the installable Android applications, adds to the reader. It allows you to connect to your Calibre library directly from your Nook and download books without having to connect to your computer.

I am a huge fan of Calibre. It makes it easy for me to organize my large ebook collection (over 700 books and counting!) and find what I want to read. I love that you can tag books with topical labels as well as their series name and book number. The idea of being able to connect to my Nook over wi-fi, which is readily available as long as I have my phone, was incredibly tempting. So, I set out to make it happen.

Rooting was easy because I have a Nook with a lower serial number, meaning that the hardware hasn’t been updated in such a way that restoring the Nook to the original 1.0.0 firmware will brick the device. All I had to do was pop in a micro SD card (I had a spare 512MB one lying around), restore the Nook to the original firmware, then “upgrade” to the rooted version of the 1.5 firmware. I’m not going to go into the installation details—if you want to root your Nook, the Nook Devs site is really your best bet. They have rooting instructions for all contingencies, including new Nooks that would be bricked using the method that I used.

Once I got the Nook rooted, I went about exploring the user interface of the new Launcher. Things were confusing enough that I accidentally deleted one of the stock icons and couldn’t get it back. Strike one against the root. It took me a few moments to get accustomed to things, and once I did I began to explore some of the third-party rooted apps you can install.

I installed a few apps and got Trook up and running with my Calibre information. That worked pretty well, but it was slow. Another annoyance was that anything I downloaded via Trook went to the /my documentsfolder in a subfolder called Downloads. Despite the fact that all my Calibre-loaded ebooks are in subfolders, Downloads isn’t picked up when you refresh your Nook’s library to bring in new content. I would be forced to use the rooted NookDevs library, which I found to be slow and buggy. Strikes two and three for the root. I tried to be patient with it, but I found myself frustrated so easily that I knew I did not want to make the effort to use it anymore.

I can put up with a lot when I’m hacking my tech. I have my Apple TV hacked within an inch of its life so I could do things like stream Hulu (via XBMC) and Netflix on it. Hulu looks great on my 1st gen Apple TV—when the stream works. Reliable streaming became intermittent at best recently due to changes on the backend of Hulu’s streaming. Netflix can be choppy and at weird resolutions due to using Firefox to watch it on the ATV. When I didn’t really have any better options, this worked just fine because it utilized the tech I already had rather than buying a new shiny just to gain a couple of features. It wasn’t the most elegant solution ever, but it enabled me to watch three seasons of Doctor Who in the comfort of my bedroom instead of wresting control of the TV from my husband. It wasn’t HD, but it was more than watchable. It was worth it to me to be able to watch when and where I liked.

I thought that the hack for the Nook would be similar—not elegant, but extending the features enough that I could put up with any small annoyances. Well, the annoyances were big, the features weren’t what I had hoped for, and it made my Nook feel slow and bloated. That’s not a compromise I am willing to make. So I restored my Nook back to the unrooted firmware and I couldn’t be happier—because it works, just as advertised. That’s enough for me.