Touch Accessing Nook Without Registering

[Tarana]

With the concerns about B&N and the difficulties that UK customers had with accessing their Nooks should they need to factory reset their units, I did a search and found that at least another forum had a fix for the Nook Simple Touch (see below). Does anybody know of similar ways of being able to use their newer ereader should Nook go out of business? For instance, I have an early GlowLight (no side buttons) in addition to the current Glo3. Could be this was discussed, but I didn't see any solutions in the threads.

I copied and pasted directly. Credit given within article.

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How to use the Nook Simple Touch without registering

However, the Nook Simple Touch forces you to create a Barnes & Noble account and add a credit card on file before you can actually use the device you paid for.

Aside from being a bad out-of-box experience, it also makes things like selling the Nook down the line harder (assuming you like to reset your devices before selling them and the buyer wants to see them actually working before paying.)

Well, for anyone else in the same boat, here’s how to get your Nook Simple Touch up and running without registering. Please note that all credit for this solution goes to crazy_jake from the xda-developers forums.

Turn on the device, but do NOT start setting it up. B&N devilishly waits until the last step to ask you to create an account, at which point the following instructions don’t work. If you do start setting it up, just turn it off and back on again.

Hold down the top right button on the front of the device and slide your finger from left to right across the top of the E Ink screen. (It’s a little hard to see, but it’s the Nook’s default next page button if you were using your right hand. For past Kindle owners, it’s the one in the same spot as the previous page button on a Kindle.)

A ‘Factory’ button should appear in the top left corner of the screen. Press it.

Once in the Factory menu, hold down the top right button on the front of the device and tap the bottom right corner of the screen.

You should now see a ‘Skip Oobe’ button. Tap that and the Nook should finally load the home screen.
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This link shows how to do the above in a pictoral illustration.

[Calenorn]

So, what precisely are you aiming to do?

You always have the option of simply turning off the wifi. Then anything you've downloaded will stay put on the ereader.

Also, anything you side load will still be there.

I'd be very careful about tinkering under the hood. Having said that, if you're using the new NOOK Glowlight 3, in the Settings Menu select About. You can press the NOOK logo above the "Check for System Update" button to access the factory settings. (It might need to be pressed several times.) Now, what a person can do with this is beyond my experience. There is an "Android Development Settings" button, but I'm not going to mess with it!

[Tarana]

I'm aiming to skip the registration requirement. And no, when you do a factory reset, nothing is left on there except the operating system. All the books, even side-loaded are removed.

Almost everybody who uses their gadgets until they die eventually has to do a factory reset because their device loses its brains. If you can't register the device because B&N/Nook isn't there any longer, you need to be able to bypass the registration page or you can't use your device. That is what I'm trying to get at. On the kindle, if you don't register your device, you can still use it although some of the functions will not be available. On the Nook, nothing works.

[Tarana]

By the way, I found by bypassing registration, I can sideload books without having to have all the B&N books in the cloud also showing up in the library. So, the Nook ST is now devoted to sideloaded epubs.

How to do a Manual Restore on Nook ST

This will actually restore it to the same exact way you got it from the store, brand new, including with the un-updated software assuming that there have been updates since you got it. It's the Nook equivalent of restoring your computer with a fresh format and new Windows/Mac/Linux installation.

Pop out your SDCard if you have one installed, again just to be safe.

Turn off your Nook by pressing the Power Button on the top of it.

With it off, showing you the blank white screen, press and hold the power button until the screen flickers black for a second, then continue to hold it for another 12 seconds. You won't see anything happen at this point, the screen will stay white.

Repeat the above step 6 more times in a row. Yep, you read that right, 6 more times in a row. My assumption is they do this so people don't accidentally restore their Nooks during normal use.

Now press the Power Button once to turn the Nook back on.

You'll see the touch screen go black, with a sky blue progress bar, and a description of what it's doing, such as mounting the drive, formatting, etc. This takes a few minutes so be patient.

Once it does that, it'll boot up to your main screen, (it can take a while) with any previous version of the software showing, and you'll need to treat it just as you did when it was brand spanking new. i.e. re-register it, set the display name again, reload your screensavers, books and so on.

To update to the latest software version, press the "My Library" button, and make sure you're in the "My B&N Library" area; tap the "Check for new B&N content" button, it'll re-discover that it needs to be updated to the latest software, and automatically go through that process again for you. It can and often does take some time, and do some reboots, partition mounting, etc., so just be patient and let it do it's thing.

[wildophanim]

OMG! Thank you so much for this! This also works for the original Nook Glowlight by the way. I just got one for $10 plus a case from a thrift store, it wasn't set up, it was reset by the previous owner and for some reason, it was not recognizing any wifi at all, not my home wifi, nowhere, and I would have set up an account, I think this model isn' supported anymore, I don't know, I would have signed up for a barns and noble account if I had been able to get wifi. I'll sign up now, just wanted to let you know it worked for me and helped me a lot.

[cromag]

This is an old thread, but I needed to do this and it was very helpful. Also, I was able to find a Youtube video that illustrates how to do it (and just how easy it is!). The video shows the Glowlight model, but this procedure worked, exactly as demonstrated, on my non-Glowlight Nook Simple Touch Reader.

[remember]

I got my 1st gen (?) regular black and white nook (with touch bar on bottom) deregistered, finally. My steps are as follows. I think you can skip the wifi thing and do the factory reset, but I'm not sure.

Prelude - may not be needed

1. Connect to Wifi. The error message says you can't deregister without it.
2. Load up example.com and verify the wifi works.
3. Mine didn't even deregister once I connected the wifi.
4. Sent an email to the owner since apparently BN phone support refuses to reset old Nooks.

Main section:

4.5. Attempt the factory reset by doing the power button + 12 second hold thing 6 times. I must've messed up holding it down once, because:
5. After a few restarts, apparently it downloaded a firmware update while it was on the wifi? Clever, ornery device.
6. It got stuck in the restart / install sequence. After several hours of waiting, I went back to trying the restart method.
7. Eventually, the touch screen showed "Restoring to Factory Fallback..."
8. I had the normal factory fresh experience. I didn't have to do anything else. Apparently G1 Nooks (or early firmwares?) let you bypass registration with just a menu prompt.

In theory, a hack could open up the Nooks the same way the Kindles often are. Seems like they're much less popular in general and among hackers. Would something like this be relevant? https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=92223

https://www.reddit.com/r/nook/commen..._a_hard_reset/