Mobipocket SA is a French company incorporated in March 2000 that produces Mobipocket Reader software, an e-book reader for some Personal digital assistants (PDA), wireless telephones and desktop operating systems.

The Mobipocket software package is free and consists of various publishing and reading tools for PDA, Smartphones, cellular phones and e-book devices (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, webOS, Java ME, BlackBerry, Psion, Kindle and iLiad).

History [edit]

Mobipocket.com was bought by Amazon.com in 2005.^[1] Amazon's acquisition was believed to be a result of Adobe Systems's announcement that it would no longer sell its eBook packaging and serving software.^[2]

An alpha release of the Java-based version of the mobipocket reader was made available for cellphones on June 30, 2008.^[3] There is also a reader for desktop computers running Microsoft Windows, which also works with computers running Mac OS X and Linux using WINE.^[4]

It has been widely reported that since Amazon's acquisition of Mobipocket, software support, user support, and platform growth was ended. In December, 2011, it was reported that Amazon officially notified the book publishers that it was ending support for Mobipocket.^[5] The status of Mobipocket Digital Rights Management (DRM) content previously purchased by users continues to be unclear since currently no other ebook reader supports this proprietary DRM method.^[6]

Design [edit]

The software provides:

• A personalized press review using the Mobipocket Web Companion, an automated content extraction tool dedicated to press articles.
• eBooks, including for each book a biography of the writer. Each downloaded eBook is registered in the My Mobipocket personal virtual library, from which a user has access to any previously downloaded eBook.
• A secure reading system, as a result of the encryption of eBooks using DRM and unique signature, a timestamp added to each book at the time of purchase.

Mobipocket on a Psion Series 5 PDA (with further information)

Depending on the device, different functions are available. Those are usually managing of books and their metadata, assigning books to arbitrary categories, auto-scroll, rotate by 90° or 180°, bookmarks, custom hyperlinks within one or between different documents, highlighting, comments and by sketches. When transferring documents to other device types, functions that are not supported on the device will be ignored, but the information one is reading will not be altered or deleted.

Implementations [edit]

There is a reader for personal computers that works with either encrypted or unencrypted Mobipocket books.

Unencrypted Mobipocket books can be read on the Amazon Kindle natively, as well as in Amazon Kindle programs on Mac OS X, the iPhone, Android devices, Windows, and Windows Phone devices. By using third-party programs such as Lexcycle Stanza, Calibre or Okular, unencrypted Mobipocket books can also be read on Mac OS X, the iPhone, Android devices and Linux.

A user can thus create documents in the Mobipocket format .mobi and Palm OS format .PRC^[7] and use personal comments, bookmarks, and so on on all devices supporting those features. Additionally, Amazon offers a free program called KindleGen that can convert or create documents in the Mobipocket format^[8]

As of 2012^[update] here is no way to print or export the text of a Mobipocket file, nor the personalized additions, without manually selecting, copying and pasting them piece by piece.^[9]

Despite great demand from owners of Android based mobile phones,^[10] Mobipocket has not released a version for Android. Owners of Android devices can download Amazon's Kindle application from the Android App store,^[11] which can read .mobi files, though no official Mobipocket reader for the Android platform has been released.

Long term plans for the Mobipocket platform are in question in the wake of Amazon's announcement of the Kindle Format 8,^[12] which moves in the direction of HTML5 and CSS3. As one of the most popular e-reader devices,^[13] the Kindle has great sway in the popularity of e-reader formats.

See also [edit]

• Comparison of e-book formats
• List of e-book readers
• Microsoft Reader
• TomeRaider

References [edit]

External links [edit]

• Official website

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