PhilMur's thoughts on biz/tech/money/life

Last Christmas I was fortunate enough to receive a Nook reader, the device sold by Barnes and Noble which competes directly with the industry-leading device, Kindle.  Not only did I begin reading books on my Nook device, I also downloaded the Barnes and Noble reader software for my PC, later retitled in a later release, “Nook for PC”.  During this most recent software update, I experienced a number of changes in the software — mostly positive.

BUT… I have found that their new PC reader software no longer allows copying of text!!  In the past, you could select a sentence or passage that stood out to you, press CTRL+C to copy the text, and paste it where else you like.

If I am reading through a book and find a particularly good/memorable passage (as is happening often as I read through Stuart Vyse’s Going Broke: Why Americans Can’t Hold On To Their Money right now), I am not able to copy a sentence or paragraph and drop it into a word document, blog post, etc. for further reference.  In the past, this was possible, but it appears they have removed the technology from the reader.  No doubt this was due to publisher concerns around plagiarism, copyright issues, etc.  Though I don’t own  a Kindle, out of curiosity as to how this works in the Kindle for PC software tool, I downloaded that software, downloaded a free book, and encountered the same thing – no “copy” function on any of the menus, available via right click after selecting text, and no CTRL+C functionality available.

So what’s the solution?

In both the Nook for PC and the Kindle for PC software, a “search” feature of some kind exists on the menu that appears after you select text from a page and right-click on the selected text.  In Nook for PC, it gives you the right-click menu option to search Wikipedia for that text, and in the case of Kindle for PC, without even having to right-click it pops up a menu after you select the text which includes the option of searching the book itself for instances of the text you have selected.  Selecting either function results in the corresponding search being triggered, and viewing of those search words (or paragraph as it may be) in the search tool.  So, while this solution lacks elegance, these search features do get the text, long as the passage may be, into a editable, copyable input box in your browser (the Wikipedia search in Nook for PC) or into an editable field (search box in Kindle for PC).

After the search has been triggered, you simply go to the field where the now-editable search text is located, select the text, click CTRL+C and your text is now in the clipboard, ready for pasting into a blog posting, word document or whatever.  As always, make sure not to violate copyright laws and to follow proper procedures for citing the source of the quoted text.