Using Kindle on the iPhone / iPod Touch, to the fullest
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:
- Connect to the iPhone and navigate to the “/var/mobile/Applications/” directory. All of your applications will be listed here, however, using their GUIDs
- Find the GUID that corresponds to Kindle (hint: it will contain a child directory called “Kindle.app”) and go into it
- Go into the “Documents” directory, followed by the “eBooks” directory. Your path should look something like this: “/var/mobile/Applications/{GUID}/Documents/eBooks/”
- 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
