Until November 25th Pragmatic Press is offering 40% off all their existing print and upcoming print books. I took advantage of this and picked up a few print books, but one of the books I wanted was eBook only. No problem, except… no Kindle. So:
- Jailbreak iPhone if you haven’t done so already. Very important to change your root and mobile user passwords – root’s password by default is `alpine’ - either by installing Cydia’s Terminal application or sshing into your phone. (Jailbreaking is a time consuming process and I feel guilty about putting it as a single step.)
- You will need to install OpenSSH so you can copy files to the phone; you will probably also want to install Terminal. Both of these applications are available for free within Cydia, just search for them and install. It will take a long time for your very first ssh connection to your phone to connect as its generating encryption keys.
- Install the free Kindle app on the iPhone from the iTunes store.
- The Kindle stores its books in an `eBooks’ folder buried in the `/var/mobile/Applications/…/Documents/eBooks’ where the `…’ is a GUID identifying the application.
- SSH (preferably a client where you can copy and paste) or Terminal.
find -type d /var/mobile/Applications -name 'eBooks'
- a. Copy the GUID, and you’ll want to end up with the path in 2.1, above, but where the `…’ is replaced by the GUID. (On my device the GUID was 127DF7F1-9B49-423B-9FA9-77AB87775E24 but I don’t know if this is the same across devices; probably not.)
- This is purely for convenience, mainly because I want to use WinSCP to copy files from my Windows 7 PC to my iPhone and I don’t want to remember the GUID for the Amazon application every time I want to do this. (You can also use command line scp, but you’ll likely still want to create a symlink.) (You may also want to use `/private/var/root/Media/eBooks’ if you prefer a better organizational hierarchy.)
ln -s /var/mobile/Applications/YOUR_GUID/Documents/eBooks \ /private/var/root/eBooks
- Now you can use WinSCP or scp to copy *.mobi files directly into your device’s `/private/var/root/eBooks’ directory; books you copy here will be available in the Amazon Kindle iPhone app next time you launch it.