Reading Books on iPhone and iPod Touch

Ever though of reading books on iPod touch or iPhone. It would the life much easier because then you need not carry books with yourself to read and will not be said because you are able to buy those cool PDAs which have Office applications and PDF viewer installed on them. Below are the applications that can help you do that and will make your life a bit easier.

Reading applications:

* iPhone Bookshelf - website / iTunes app store
o PalmDoc, Mobipocket, Plucker formats
* eReader - website / iTunes app store
o PalmDoc, eReader formats
* FileMagnet - website / iTunes app store
o While not technically an eReader it does support Doc (RTF?) and PDF formats. Requires the use of a Mac OS X only desktop application.



iPhone 2.0 (first gen and 3G)

Quick Instructions - pre-2.0

1. This requires a "jailbroken" iPhone with Installer.app installed - try ZiPhone.
2. Using Installer.app add textReader to your iPhone.
3. Use textReader's "Download File via URL" function to load an ebook - http://mnybks.net/pdb/6389 will get you Frankenstein. The number corresponds with the mnybks.net ID listed below the download list for each title. (Visit http://manybooks.net/m for the mobile version of this site with quick links!).

iPhone 1.1.3 users!


You can store a book on your iPhone -- find a book you'd like to read, then click the "Bookmarklet" link! Open the URL, save to your iPhone "Home Screen", and you'll have something ready to read, even without a net connection, thanks to the wonders of data:URL.

Jailbroken iPhones/iPods with firmware 1.1.4 : use Books.app

This appears to work only with firmware 1.1.4 - firmware 1.1.3 will fail!

Download and install Installer.app on your iPhone -- it's a simple process (a very thorough walk-through is available on Gizmodo.) Afterwards you'll be able to install applications like Books.app with just a few taps. Books.app also has a straightforward script for copying HTML files to your iPhone (try an "iPhone Books.app" file from manybooks!) available at http://code.google.com/p/iphoneebooks/wiki/InstallingEBooks.


* Create a bookshelf (requires an account - sign up, if necessary)
* 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!

There's a good walkthrough of this process at ModMyiFone.com.

Sources for the most recent additions to each Category are also available in the plist directory.


Alternatives:

* Try the new iPhone app "textReader" from http://code.google.com/p/iphonetextreader/ (Palm Doc format files will work).
* Also worth keeping an eye on is ruBooks, a flexible adaptation of the Books.app source code. More information here.
* Read in 10k chunks - HTML view (really only looks OK on iPhone).
* Download an iPhone-sized PDF.
* Email files to yourself.
* Use Bookmarklets.

Browse manybooks.net or mnybks.net with your iPhone. Specialized CSS is utilized in both cases, but mnybks.net is also stripped down and quick. When browsed with an iPhone the full manybooks.net site has links to HTML and PDF downloads on mnybks.net.
Other sites

Some other folks are working on solutions that may work for iPhone users - the most notable ones are:

* Scrollbox.org a site that displays Project Gutenberg files, and lets you upload your own content as well.
* Books.app a native iPhone application for reading text and HTML files.

No comments: