Hackers working on the Barnes & Noble Nook have gotten a huge gimmee. nookDevs member poutine took the back off of his and discovered that the device’s filesystem is stored on a 2GB microSD card instead of onboard flash. Mounting the card revealed three ext3 partitions. You can find a listing of the files here. It’s mostly a stock Cupcake build with a few additions like ./system/app/instorewifi-release.apk. The debug interface, adb, is included so its a matter of adding it to the startup script to begin talking to the device over USB.

When the nook was announced, I was interested because it’s an Android device but worried that it would be too locked down to be fun. This is an amazing discovery and being able to modify the filesystem directly will surely make hack development much easier. The back is just screwed on so it isn’t that difficult to remove and since it’s under an external cover I can imagine people keyholing it to get easy access to the card. Veteran Android hackers like JesusFreke have already jumped in to help out. You can find them actively working in #nookdevs on Freenode.