My wife received a basic Nook for Christmas.  Being electronically challenged, she immediately plopped it in my lap with instructions to "Buy me a book". As the nearest B&N store is 30 miles away I elected to follow the B&N site to my PC, to the Nook route.  Opening an account on the B&N site, purchasing a book and downloading it to my PC was easy and fast. Prices are about half that of a printed version. Passing it along to the Nook was another matter.  The Nook came with virtually no usable instructions, either printed or electronic, to explain the procedure that I wanted to use.  After going back to the B&N site I discovered a little free program called "Nook for PC". After downloading that program I was able to copy the book from my PC to the Nook. Everything works fine now, and my wife is addicted to the thing, she takes it everywhere. She still will not, however, try to load new purchases on the Nook.