Updated Today (2 hours ago) by roosterspice
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InstallingEBooks  
How to copy EBooks to your iPhone so Books.app can read them.
Introduction

This tutorial uses iPHUC to install eBooks into your Media/EBooks directory, where Books.app looks for them. It is not neccesary to jailbreak your phone to do so--but of course, if you've installed Books.app your phone has already been jailbroken...

This tutorial has been written for Mac OS X.
Copy books using iPHUC

   1. Get and install iPHUC.
   2. Plug in your iPhone to your computer. If iTunes opens, let your phone sync and then quit iTunes.
   3. Run iPHUC from the command-line (Terminal.app on a Mac).
   4. Type: ls to see your Media directory. If you haven't already created an EBooks folder, type mkdir EBooks .
   5. Type: cd EBooks to put yourself into the EBooks directory.
   6. Assuming you have a text file in your home directory, you can copy it to the EBooks folder by typing putfile /Users/yourusername/some_book.txt some_book.txt where "yourusername" is your user name. Note that, at least at this point, iPHUC requires the full path to the file you're copying.
   7. If you want a prettier name on the Books.app file browser, you could type putfile /Users/yourusername/some_book.txt Some\ Book,\ by\ Jane\ Author . Note you need to escape all spaces with backslashes.
   8. If you have a directory which contains a book broken up into chapters, you need to create a new directory and copy over each file separately. Pain in the neck, but I hope to have a tool to automate this soon. 

Copy books using scp

To do this, you must first have enabled SSH on your phone, or it won't work at all, and you must be connected to a Wi-Fi network.

   1. Find out your iPhone's IP address: Settings -> WiFi, then click the blue arrow to the right of your checked network. The IP address will be listed on the next screen. For the example we'll call it 192.168.1.1.
   2. Make sure you don't let your iPhone sleep in the next few steps!
   3. If you have one file, you can type: scp /path/to/file.html root@192.168.1.1:/var/root/Media/EBooks (assuming you've already created the EBooks directory)
   4. If you have more than one file in a local directory, for instance a book broken into chapters, you can type scp -r /path/to/directory root@192.168.1.1:/var/root/Media/EBooks
   5. Enter your password and the book will be copied over! 

Making your eBooks look nicer

Text files straight from Project Gutenberg have a couple of problems for our purposes. First of all, they're very long, which makes it difficult to jump to a certain chapter, and second of all, they kinda look really ugly on the iPhone's screen.

Fortunately, there are several ways to fix this. One of the easiest is to simply download the HTML version of a given text, if it's available. For instance, Wuthering Heights has a fine HTML version. This does not solve the problem of long files, though.

Instead, I strongly recommend grabbing a copy of GutenMark and compiling it on your machine. You can use GutenMark on a plain text Gutenberg file, and then use the associated utility GutenSplit to split the HTML file into chapters. It works very well (usually). See GutenMark's documentation for details.

I intend to create a customized version of GutenSplit that will create HTML files tailored for the iPhone, and some time after that I will create a Mac OS X application that will both provide a front-end for GutenMark and also install eBooks on the iPhone automatically.