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:

 

  1. 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.&#160; (Jailbreaking is a time consuming process and I feel guilty about putting it as a single step.) </li> <ol> <li>You will need to install OpenSSH so you can copy files to the phone; you will probably also want to install Terminal.&#160; Both of these applications are available for free within Cydia, just search for them and install.&#160; It will take a long time for your very first ssh connection to your phone to connect as its generating encryption keys.</li> </ol> <li>Install the free Kindle app on the iPhone from the iTunes store. <ol> <li>The Kindle stores its books in aneBooks’ 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'

    <ol>
  <li>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.&#160; (On my device the GUID was <font size="2" face="conso">127DF7F1-9B49-423B-9FA9-77AB87775E24</font> but I don’t know if this is the same across devices; probably not.) </li>
</ol>

  • 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.) 

    <br />

<pre class="brush: bash;">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.