Books.app, an "unofficial" application for the iPhone, requires more than just a tap to install. But don't look for PDF support.

A new freely-available application is bringing eBooks to the iPhone. The only problems for users are that it doesn't support PDF format books, and that it's not an approved third party application. So installation isn't easy as a result.

Books.app, a reader intended for Project Gutenberg and other public domain and Creative Commons licensed texts rendered as plain text or HTML. The application, maintained by Zach Brewster-Geisz, is posted on the project's Wiki

. Unlike TextoniPhone.com, a web-based eBook service for the iPhone that provides a library of more than 20,000 books, Books.app runs on the iPhone itself, and stores the books locally so that web access isn't required to read them. But it also requires a certain amount of patience and skill to get Books.app onto the iPhone.

"Eventually, this project will include a simple method of syncing eBooks to your iPhone," Brewster-Geisz says on the home page of the iPhoneeBook Wiki. "At the moment, that's handled by iPHUC and a shell script called copybookdir.sh." The iPhone Utility Client, an open-source tool for modifying iPhones, and a "jailbreak" utility that puts the phone into a state where files can be written to it.

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