Read Kindle Books on OSX with Kindle for PC and WINE

Through careless placement in a bag and rough handling by airline employees, my Kindle broke a few months ago. Luckily, Amazon recently came out with an app to read Kindle books on your PC. Unfortunately, there is no Mac version as of yet, though one is supposedly "coming soon". If you're willing to do a little work, though, you can get the PC version working on a Mac (at least on a MacBook Pro running 10.6):

1. Get WINE. Since I already had Fink installed, I just used that, but any of the ways here should work. Note that if you compile from source you'll need to have xcode installed.

2. Download the Windows Kindle app installer. As of this writing (1/4/10), the latest version won't work with this method, but an older beta available here worked fine. If/when Amazon has a new update for the software, I'll try it with the latest version.

3. Open a terminal. An easy way to do this is to go to spotlight and type in "terminal" and click the first result.

4. Assuming the Windows installer is in the Downloads folder, type in the following (don't type the quotes): "wine Downloads/KindleForPC-installer.exe" (NB: While I don't know why they would do this, it's possible that one of the WINE installation methods would neglect to put wine in the PATH. If so, let me know and I'll update this)

5. The installer should automatically rip through the install and then run the program. Due to compatibility issues, things won't show up right yet, so once the install is done close the window that pops up.

6. Back in the terminal, type (again, ignoring quotes): "winecfg"

7. In the configuration panel that pops up, go to the Applications tab. Click Add application, and in the dialog box that pops up go to Program Files, then Amazon, then Kindle For PC, then click KindleForPC.exe.

8. Back in the configuration panel, select KindleForPC.exe and go down to the dropdown box that says "Windows Version". Select Windows 98.

9. Apply the settings and click OK to close the configuration box.

10. Now the application should work normally once run. Assuming you set up WINE with the standard directories (and if you didn't, you know how to modify this), the following command in the terminal will run the program (again, no quotes): "wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Amazon/Kindle\ For\ PC/KindleForPC.exe"

11. Have fun reading!