I was admiring a co-workers new Kindle device recently and noticed that there is a Kindle application for Android available in the Android Market. This application works quite well. The e-books are reasonably easy to read although without the e-ink screen technology used by the real Kindle there is no reading in bright sunlight on a phone. However, buying a book (even a free one) from Amazon makes it pretty much immediately available on the phone to be read.

However, I'm interested to try it out with Project Gutenberg e-book. This project has for years been colecting electronic versions of free and out-of-copyright texts. They are now available in various e-book formats in addition to the usual plain text that Project Gutenberg prefers. It turns out that you can use these texts with the Android Kindle application. You download the Kindle version of your chosen e-book and it arrives as a .mobi file. This needs to be moved to the kindle directory on your sdcard. Once there, the next time the Kindle app is started it will notice the new files and show them in the list. They won't have cover images but otherwise they work great.