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The NOOK Simple Touch isn’t just an eBook reader with a 6 inch E Ink touchscreen display. While that’s what Barnes & Noble markets the device as, it’s actually a cheap Android tablet with a slow processor, a small battery, a black and white screen with a low screen refresh rate, and a custom user interface designed for reading eBooks.

Yeah, when you put it that way, it’s not that exciting. But since the NOOK software is based on Android, hackers that want to do more than read books with the device have been figuring out ways to run Android apps and games and even speed up the screen so it can handle video.

One limitation though, is the fact that out of the box the NOOK Simple touch only supports one touch at a time, while many Android apps work best with multitouch.

But it turns out there’s a hack for that.

Xda-developers forum member wheilitjohnny and mali100 have posted tools that you can use on a rooted NOOK Touch to enable support for multitouch. The easiest way to apply the update is to download the multitouch.zip from mali100 to your eReader and flash it using ClockworkMod Recovery.

If that sounds confusing, you might want to check out the forum threads for rooting the NOOK Touch and installing ClockworkMod Recovery first.

The folks at NOOKDevs also have a simple method for rooting most NOOK eReaders.

Once you’ve enabled multitouch, you should be able to pinch to zoom in all sorts of apps, including games and even PDF viewers.

via The Digital Reader