Those who have an untethered 4.2.1 jailbreak for their iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad have found themselves unable to read books they have legally purchased within iBooks. Trying to open a DRM-protected book will produce the following error message: “There is a problem with the configuration of your iDevice. Please restore with iTunes and reinstall iBooks.” Deleting iBooks and reinstalling an older version will not help resolve this issue. Luckily, @comex has come up with a fix.

According to @comex:

It seems that before opening a DRMed book, iBooks drops an improperly signed binary, tries to execute it, and if it works concludes that the device is jailbroken and refuses to open the book.

This is what the binary does:

int main() {
return 42;
}

In short, Apple has some code in place to detect a jailbroken device and prevent the user from reading purchased books with DRM-protection. This includes the free Winnie-the-Pooh book. Non-DRM books will open just fine in iBooks. But now, thanks to @comex, you can fix this problem without restoring or re-jailbreaking your device. You may download the .deb file @comex has released here. In case you don’t know how to install .deb files, this is what you should do next:

1. Connect your computer to your jailbroken device using SSH.

You may use various applications, such as WinSCP for Windows, and Cyberduck for Mac (using alpine as the root password).
An excellent free application you can use on both PCs and Macs is iPhone Explorer. This will enable a connection without the need to enter a root password.

2. Go to the folder /var/root/Media/

If you’re using iPhone Explorer, which I highly recommend, you should double click on your device icon and navigate through Root/var/root/Media.

3. Create two new folders within /var/root/Media/

First, make a new folder named Cydia.
Within this, make another folder named AutoInstall.
(Note: Folder names are case-sensitive.)

4. Copy hunnypot.deb into the AutoInstall folder.
(Just drag it into the appropriate folder within iPhone Explorer.)

5. Reboot your device.

Once you have completed the above, you’ll be able to read all your purchased content on iBooks without any issues. As a bonus, Skype will also now work without giving its warning message on your jailbroken device: “This version of Skype is only supported on unmodified iPhone OS 3.0.x, 3.1.x, and 3.2.x.” Note that this message has never actually prevented Skype from working; it was merely an irritation that now is easily vanquished.

Should installing a .deb file seem too troublesome or complicated for you, you can wait for the patch to be released on Cydia.

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