Living the Dream

When Amazon released the Kindle app for the iPhone (App Store link), they delivered a solid eBook reader with a direct tie-in to the Amazon Kindle Store – making it easy to purchase a book from Amazon and have it wirelessly delivered to your iPhone via the WhisperSync service.

While the Kindle Store is a great source of new books, many other sites have a much broader selection of free, classic books in various eBook formats.

Some of the best of these are sites like Project Gutenberg and FeedBooks, both of which offer deep libraries of free eBooks, with many titles that have yet to show up as free (if at all) in the Kindle store.   It’s this selection of free titles that has led many users to stay with apps like (the also excellent) Stanza as their eReader of choice on the iPhone.

If you’re a Kindle app fan who likes the convenience of the tie-in to the Kindle store, but you’d also like access to the freebies, there’s good news – assuming you jailbreak your phone.

Once jailbroken, if you’ll connect to your phone via Bonjour (which you can do easily using a client like Transmit – you can also use the IP address of your iPhone to connect, but Bonjour is usually simpler) by logging in with the default username/password combo of root/alpine, you can navigate to the Kindle App’s eBook folder, and drop in .prc and .mobi files that you’ve downloaded directly from any of these sites.   The next time you start up the Kindle for iPhone app, the books will be right there in your library, ready for your enjoyment.

To get to the right folder, once you log in you’ll need to go to the root of the file system, then navigate to \User\Applications\UUIDofApp\Documents\eBooks.   The only tricky part, if you’ve installed a lot of apps, is figuring out which UUID is being used for the Kindle app.   Opening up a UUID folder, you’ll note the Application name is listed as a folder (Appname.app).   You may need to find the right folder by trial and error.   Once you find it, make sure to make note of the UUID so you can find it again easily in the future.

Good luck – and happy reading.