The necessity of backing up your purchased Nook Books

Since the shutting down of FictionWise sounded the alarm to eBook buyers, now the Barnes & Noble ring the alarm bell again.

An article on Consumerist reports a terrible case caused by Barnes & Noble eBook DRM. She purchased Nook eBooks months ago, and maybe lost the file by accident. Yesterday when she tried download the book from her Nook Library agian, she got an error message saying that she is not allowed to download the book again because the credit card she used to buy the book is expired.

This is the quote of her words:

I already paid for it. Who cares if the credit card is expired? It has long since been paid for, so the status of the card on file has nothing to do with my ability to download said book.

This is just one more proof that DRM is not just protect the publisher's benefit, but also do harm to the buyers like her, maybe you and me in the future. And I do believe there will be more cases like this.

Don't forget Kindle also removed their customer's books directly from the cloud library just a couple of days ago.

I know strip the DRM from eBooks is againt the publisher's terms, but why we should tolerate their unfair (or even rude) action on our purchased books? So if you do not want to lose your purchased contents someday, I advise you back up your eBooks before suffering a loss. You can learn how to back up your Nook and Adobe protected books at the last paragraph of this post. In addition, refer to this article to learn how to back up Kindle books as it is not included in the post above.

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Why you can not download your purchased Nook books any more after the credit card is expired?

The reason why you cannot get the book from Barnes & Noble's content server any more is because of the Nook DRM. Unlike other DRM protections, Nook DRM is generated upon your purchasing credit card number and the billing name, while Kindle and Adobe DRM are generated upon your website account.

If your credit card is expired, then the Nook's content server is not able to recognize your identification which suits your book's DRM protection. As a result, you can't prove that you are the owner of this book in Nook's content server any more (This is extremely stupid, you can see your order information in the B&N website, but the content server refuses to admit you have purchased the book ).

Why you must input the credit card information to strip DRM from Nook books?

Similarly, if you want to remove the DRM from Nook books, you must input the correct credit card number and the billing name (maybe it's not your real name), then the decryption program can generate the correct key to unlock your book's protection.

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