General Software Questions Galaxy Note 10.1 - books, music,...

[deehy54]

I'm a newbie to all android. I have a Samsung Note Tab 10.1. wI-fi. I've set up a Google account and have installed some apps from Google Play. I also opened a Nook account through Barnes and Noble. I'm perplexed by how the tablet is supposed to work when it is offline.
I bought a book from Nook but can only view it if I'm online. I suspect the same is true for other kinds of files. Are there other merchants that allow the file to be resident on your device so you can read a book on a trip, or stream music files in the car?
I thought that that was what storage capacity was for. Or perhaps there is some very basic setting I should adjust, or an app for just this purpose, or a method of saving files? I have installed a 32gig sd card.

Why are lists of android apps always unalphabetized? Is search the only alternative?

Thanks in advance.

 

[leeshor]

Welcome to the forum

I think you are correct when you state that it "should" store them locally. I'm not certain why it isn't. It may be a setting somewhere in the app. I don't do any E-Books so I don't have a solid answer for you but something doesn't seem right. Most of the apps in Android can't save direct to external memory. But much of the data can be moved using a file manager.

 

[deehy54]

I posted the question on another forum and I'm cross posting in case there are others with the same issue. Here is a link: General Android App software question - Computer Help Forum - GardenWeb

Sorry I haven't responded sooner. I had to go out of town today.
I read through the responses and will go through them again. Today on the road I thought I'd take screenshots (the Samsung is supposed to make doing that easy) and post pictures of what happens. Then I decided to take it to the Geek Squad at BestBuy first, since I've had the tablet less than a week.
The young lady at BB was able to get the nook app to let me read books when I'm not connected to wifi (I don't have 3 or 4g). But as everything with android so far - she got it to work but didn't know why it worked or what exactly she did to make it work. We sat side by side and she tapped through controls and settings and didn't seem to change anything. But it worked. On the way home I pulled over to the side of the road and checked and it was working. When I got home I checked it again and it is still working. I'm still mystified. She's the first to get it to work and I'm very appreciative.
I'm going to install alkido and play with things for a couple days, then repost to update. I hope things are solved.
Several people have said I should keep files on the sd card I installed. A couple people have said I need a file manager app to do that. Any suggestions?
Any other suggestions are greatly appreciated. I'll let you know how it goes.

 

[Tom T]

I would get the free ES File Explorer, extremely powerful and it makes it easy to access cloud based storage as well.
I haven't used the Nook App but it kind of sounds like you may have been accessing, or attempting to access the Nook store in order to read a book, rather than accessing the local library on your tablet.

Sent from my Galaxy Note 10.1

 

[J515OP]

Hi, sorry I'm late to the party. The books need to be downloaded before you can read them offline. Depending on the reader you are using (Google Books, B&N, Kindle) they have different ways of indicating that a book has actually been downloaded to your device and not just to your cloud library. B&N has a very obvious green bar across the cover of the book that says "Download". After touching the book to download it, it still takes sometime to download the couple of MBs that the book is. Depending on your wifi connection this can even take several minutes. Chances are you didn't allow the book to fully download before taking it offline. Then when you were in Best Buy the download completed and that is why offline "suddenly" worked without knowing what was done.

JP