Nook Sideload

2020-08-25

I recently found a few books on archive.org that I wanted to read - something not available on Amazon.

TLDR

If you use Nook and all your files suddenly disappear, rename My Books to My Documents on your Nook.

Kindle

So i downloaded them and used calibre. Unfortunately, in the interim since i’d last updated by Kindle, Amazon seems to have completely removed the option of just directly putting files onto your reader; it doesn’t even show up as an MTP device anymore. The only way to put books like that onto the device is to email them as attachments to an address associated with your Kindle (run by Amazon), which will purportedly convert them to some Amazon-specific format (probably encrypted with a shared key between device and AMZN) and allow the kindle to auto-download them.

This is an awful change, which serves only Amazon. I resolved not to use my Kindle for anything I could find outside of the kindle store.

Nook

So naturally this led me back to my original reader - my first-generation simple Nook. It wasn’t all that different of an experience - far more comparable than I remembered. It updated once I got it enough power to do so, but seemed not to suffer for it. I threw some books onto it, and started reading.

Until today.

Evidently my Nook updated again, and suddenly the interface was different, and no longer showed my files. No matter what settings i looked at, how many buttons I hit, nothing. Cool, did Nook go the way of Kindle? Was I going to have to buy a third reader just to read some damn PDFs?

Turns out, according to this post, the name of the directory changed. Instead of My Books (what it originally was), it now needs to be named My Documents. MTP still works fine, so just going in and renaming it made everything show up.