Listening to music as you read a book is just perfect. Now picture doing that on your Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader.

A few Nook device owners have hacked it to run the Pandora music application in the background.

“It wasn’t that hard,” says Robbie Trencheny, a 18-year-old student who is also the team leader at nookDevs, a wiki and an online forum for Nook enthusiasts. “Once we had rooted the Nook (on Sunday), it was only a matter of time until we could put an app on it.”

The nookDevs group has also gotten a browser, an Android twitter client called Tweet, Google Reader and a Facebook app running on the Nook.

The move opens the door to running apps on the e-reader — something that Barnes & Noble does not support officially.

“Rooting” the Nook involves hacking its system files to get full access to the device’s Android operating system. The Nook comes with access to 3G connectivity provided by AT&T that is ostensibly to used for downloading books wirelessly from the Barnes & Noble e-book store. Nook users aren’t charged for the 3G access.

But unlike jailbreaking the iPhone, rooting the Nook isn’t just about tinkering with the software. Instead, Nook customers have to take a screwdriver to get to the device’s innards. Nook’s Android OS is on a microSD card that needs to be connected to a computer to change a file on it. Once that’s done, the power of Nook’s Android OS is available to its users.

To run Pandora, Trencheny first searched for the .apk file associated with the app. “It’s a file extension that Android uses and every app has it,” he says. Once that file is wirelessly downloaded onto the 3G-enabled Nook, users have to run a command in the terminal shell of the device. With a few more steps described on the nookDevs wiki, they can get Pandora installed on the Nook.

Read the full story on Wired

Tags: Android, AT&T, Barnes & Noble, E-book, Facebook, Google Reader, iPhone, MicroSD

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