Harry Finocchiaro

If you followed my last guide, you were able to upload your already-paid-for books to your iPhone and use the Kindle app to view them. If your situation was anything like my own, you probably had a problem with the book covers not being displayed correctly. In my case, whatever book I uploaded first was the book cover that Kindle used for every other book.

This was completely unacceptable for me, so I figured out how to fix it once and for all. Unfortunately, it involved more tools and more uploading.

In order to figure out how this worked, I downloaded a free Kindle book: The Art of War. I saw that the book was placed in the same directory as all of my other books, but it added a file to the LibraryCovers directory as well. The name was ominous, it didn’t really mean anything to me. That was until I used some mobi tools (described later) and learned that the name of the file in the LibraryCover directory was a property inside of the book. Specifically, the ASIN property.

Now that I knew how to specify a cover file, all I had to do was convert all of my books to add this new property and then upload the new books and cover files to the iPhone.

The fun starts with following a guide on converting your mobi/prc files back to mobi format, but adding some extra contents: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Mobi2Mobi_GUI_Vista/XP.

Using this guide, I was able to add a keyword/filename to the ASIN property (in the exth property section). After uploading the book to the eBooks directory and the cover to the LibraryCovers directory, I was in business!

Happy tweaking…

If you are anything like me, you were very pleased with the Kindle app for the iPhone but became very sad when you found out that the only way for you to get books for it was to buy them through the Amazon Kindle store. Well, after taking the red pill, I found out that this is not entirely true! Here is what I found:

If you are going to want to use your own ebooks on the iPhone, you will need a jailbroken iPhone with OpenSSH running. If you do not know what any of that means, you may want to start by researching redsn0w, Cydia, and OpenSSH.

Next, you are going to want to convert your ebooks to the format that Kindle knows how to read: MOBI. You can do this by using a free application called Mobipocket Creator (there are other tools that can do this, but this is the one I used).

After converting your ebooks to PRC or MOBI files, you will have to put them on your iPhone using WinSCP (or some other SSH program). Here are the steps to do that:

1. Connect to the iPhone and navigate to the “/var/mobile/Applications/” directory. All of your applications will be listed here, however, using their GUIDs




2. Find the GUID that corresponds to Kindle (hint: it will contain a child directory called “Kindle.app”) and go into it




3. Go into the “Documents” directory, followed by the “eBooks” directory. Your path should look something like this: “/var/mobile/Applications/{GUID}/Documents/eBooks/”




4. Upload your new mobi (or prc) files to this directory

Now, when you open up Kindle on your iPhone you will see all of your new ebooks.

Are you covers not showing up properly? Check out my other Kindle article