I’m a software developer who runs Scribophile, an online writing group for serious writers, Writerfolio, an online writing portfolio service for freelancers, and Standard Ebooks, an open source project that produces liberated ebooks for the true book lover.

Removing the User Guide and Quick Start Guide from a B&N Nook

I own a Nook Simple Touch, and one of the many small quirks that bug me is the library has a built-in User Guide and Quick Start Guide that you apparently can’t delete.

I’ve read in places that you can delete them, but it requires permanently rooting your device. I’d rather not change the way the Nook works, and it turns out there is a way to remove those books changing anything else. It’s a little complicated, though. These instructions are for a Linux system (Ubuntu specifically), but you can also make this work under Windows or Mac.

Requirements

  1. A microSD card that you’re OK with formatting.

  2. A USB cable to connect your Nook to your computer.

Process

  1. Download noogie.img.gz, a file used in the rooting process, and extract it.

    wget http://nst-recovery.googlecode.com/files/noogie.img.gz gunzip noogie.img.gz

  2. You now have a file called noogie.img. Insert your SD card and write this image to it.

    These instructions are for Linux, but if you’re using Windows or Mac see here for instructions on formatting your SD card.

    To find out what device your system put the SD card, do:

    sudo fdisk -l

    You should see a list of devices in your computer. SD cards are usually at something like /dev/sdb. /dev/sda is usually your hard drive, so don’t use that!

    Alternatively you can use a disk management program like Palimpsest (part of GNOME and installed by default in Ubuntu) to graphically find out where your SD card is at. You should do that if you’re not that confident.

    My SD card is at /dev/sdb. We don’t want to use the volume, like /dev/sdb1; just /dev/sdb. Assuming yours is there too (but check to make sure!), use this command to write noogie.img:

    sudo dd if=noogie.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

  3. Once the image is written, unmount your SD card and power down your Nook by holding the power button for five to ten seconds. Note that you have to power down the Nook, not just put it to sleep. You should get a dialog box asking you to confirm the power down.

  4. With the Nook powered down, insert the SD card and connect the Nook to your computer with the USB cable. The Nook should turn on by itself and display a screen saying “Rooted Forever”. Don’t worry, your Nook isn’t actually rooted yet!

  5. You should now see several new volumes mounted, like “cache”, “factory”, “data”, and so on. Noogie has exposed the guts of your Nook, which you usually can’t see. We’re interested in the two guides, which are located in the only unnamed volume—on my machine, it’s listed simply as “302 MB Filesystem” and is mounted at /media/0f50b7f3-ef48-4116-a948-64a40bd92a86/. It’ll probably be called something else on your system.

    In this volume you’ll see a folder called “media”, which contains a folder called “books”, which contains—the two guides we want to get rid of! They’re owned by root, so to remove them, do:

    cd /media/0f50b7f3-ef48-4116-a948-64a40bd92a86/media/books sudo rm *.epub

That’s it!

Once you’ve deleted those two epub files, you can unmount all of the volumes, disconnect your Nook, remove the SD card, and power it up again. Everything should be back to normal, and your two useless guides will be gone for good.