How to download and read ebooks on the iPhone and iPod touch
I love ebooks, and I love the iPhone. For the longest time, I was very frustrated because of how difficult it was to get books on the iPhone. The desire to read Cory Doctorow’s latest work, Little Brother, drove me to dig a little deeper and I am happy to say that it’s actually not an impossible task! Note that this method should also work with the iPod touch.
Here’s what you need to do :
1. Get a jailbroken iPhone. There are many ways to jailbreak your iPhone. Please be aware that this may break (“brick”) your phone and void your warranty. That said, I used ZiPhone to jailbreak my iPhone and it was quite painless process.
2. Once your iPhone is jailbroken, you should have a new icon on your iPhone called Installer. This is installer.app, a fantastic tool to browse, download, install and manage third party applications on your iPhone.
3. Using Installer, find and install Books.app. This is an ebook reader for the iPhone. There’s a Books category in Installer so you can immediately install some ebooks to read.
Now, that wasn’t so difficult, right? So how do we get more ebooks on the iPhone? This is the not-so-simple part. There are a few ways to do it (using SCP, iPhuc, etc), however they all require quite a bit of technical ability. I found a simpler way to do it, and it involves manybooks.net.
Manybooks.net is a huge repository of publicly available ebooks in a variety of formats (PDF, Mobipocket, Palm Doc, HTML, etc). It also has a mobile version which works well with the iPhone.
* Go to manybooks.net and create and account. This is free.
* Create a bookshelf. You can browse the manybooks.net site and add ebooks to your bookshelf.
* Open Installer.app on your iPhone
* Tap the “Sources” tab at the bottom of the screen
* Tap “Edit” then “Add” and enter the URL for your new shelf – something like http://manybooks.net/shelf/38
* Tap “Done”
* Switch to the “Install” tab and select the ManyBooks category to see your selections.
This is where I faced a few issues. After installing a book, Installer.app would give an error message. However, when I open Books.app, the ebook was indeed successfully installed.
Hopefully, once we have the iPhone App Store in place, we will have an easier way to browse, purchase, download and read ebooks on the iPhone. In the meantime, I’m quite happy with this method.
Now, back to reading Little Brother…
Tagged with: eBooks • iPhone • ipod touch
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!