Disappearing Ebooks

I enjoy ebooks and I'm excited to see what the future of publishing will bring us. However, this innovation is not without its drawbacks-- for one, you generally don't have to worry about all of your paper books disappearing one one fell swoop. Unless your house burns down and you can't salvage your library, I guess. 

This weekend I grabbed my Nook Color for some reading, and I get a strange screen with a status bar and a cryptic message about downloading data. I'm hopeful that it's just an automatic software update, but when it's finally done and the Nook restarts, I see the "How to use your new Nook" intro video. Not a good sign. 

It gets worse. When I skip through the intro, it asks me to register my account. Uh oh. 

After registering all over again, I come to realize that my Nook has reset itself for some reason. It was back to the original, standard background, with a few obvious interface changes. Now, the saving grace is that all of your ebooks and apps are backed up through your account, and because I had re-registered my email, everything I had ever purchased for this device was available to be downloaded again. All of the icons showed up on the bottom scroll and in the library section with the option to download each one. Still, I had to download and install everything all over again. Not fun. 

To make matters worse, although the books came back fine (even remembering my last page), I could not get my apps back. I kept getting a message that they were not available for this device when I tried to re-install them. I did a little reading on BN's official Nook Color forum and found that a number of people have had these problems-- restarting itself and inability to download apps-- but I hadn't seen anyone posting about having both problems like I did. I didn't see any official responses from BN which was disheartening. I did get some tips from a few forum super users. Even though I hadn't canceled any updates, my Nook was only running on software version 1.2. The latest was 1.4.3, so I downloaded that and updated my device. After that I was able to download my apps all over again, but I still felt like I was starting from scratch. 

I don't understand why the software updated itself to an older version-- it had updated itself a few other times and I had recently checked to make sure it was up to date. The "restart" update brought a few changes to the navigation controls, but when I updated to 1.4.3 it went back to what I'd been used to. Very strange. Maybe my Nook was way behind, but I doubt that because I use it with a WiFi connection just about every day. Other people had had their Nook reset itself like mine, but I hadn't seen any official explanation on why that happened. 

Fast forward to today: I turned my Nook on while riding the train to work, and it only went to the animated white NOOK intro page. I couldn't get past that, and when I reset it, the same thing happened. So yesterday I had a Nook that had reset itself, and now I have a Nook that won't work at all. It's not that old--I bought it brand new in July of 2011. Tonight I'm going to bring it to a BN to see if an employee can help me. I can't help but be amused by the irony that while many brick and mortar stores are shutting down in favor of ebooks and online stores, I'm hoping to get help from one for my reader.