eBook reader

[.:MirrorminD:.]

Books.app is a simple eBook reader for the iPhone. It reads HTML and text files stored in your Media/EBooks folder, and is smart enough to enter subdirectories, if, for instance, you've broken a book down by chapters.

Eventually, this project will include a simple method of syncing eBooks to your iPhone. At the moment, that's handled by iPHUC and a shell script called copybookdir.sh.

Books.app is recommended for use with Project Gutenberg texts, in conjunction with GutenMark, a fantastic PG markup tool by Ronald Burkey, which makes pretty HTML out of Gutenberg .txt files, and splits them by chapter using a second tool. I have, for the hell of it, included a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which you can download here and expand into your Media/EBooks directory on your iPhone, so you can easily judge the reading experience.

Note: I have heard that people have been having difficulty getting the source code/binaries for GutenMark. I am contacting the author to see about mirroring the code. Please be patient.

Another option is manybooks.net, where you can download HTML-ized Gutenberg and other Creative-Commons licensed texts. The site's maintainer has told me he intends to create a preset for download that will work well with Books.app (thanks, Matt!). For now, select a book and choose to download the "Custom HTML" version.

Books.app stands on the shoulders of giants, most notably iphonenes, mobileterminal, and Erica Sadun's first "word processor."

An installable package is available in the Downloads area, and the Installation wiki page has some details on installing the package to your iPhone. This is not for the faint of heart. InstallingEBooks explains how to get eBooks onto your phone where Books.app can find them. This is slightly less bothersome.

[PhatKid]

Thanks! Can't wait to try this out.

[tanakiye]

i'd like to share the icon i've been using with this app...

[89.tristan]

pdf support anyone?

[funwithamar]

is there a way to convert pdf for the books.app

thanks

[benne]

is there a way to convert pdf for the books.app

thanks

You may convert pdf to html or txt by using tools like Adobe Acrobat, Able2Extract, etc. But as long as there's no complete iPhone PDFreader (i.e. big files in landscape view, search function, bookmarking, ...) one solution (besides the still limited PDFViewer) is to split big pdfs (PDFTools, freeware http://sheelapps.com/index.php?p=PDF...ge&action=view) to make them smaller than the ~9 mb Safari size limit and read them via the onboard solution and the great PDF/CHM/DOC/XLS Viewer (available on the Installer, http://modmyi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88821
http://modmyi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=52021).