If Amazon was short sighted enough to stop licensing its Mobi Format, especially outside the US it may end up surrendering the global market to Adobe and eReader and any other formats who have no qualms of doing so.

A Lot of Publishers in Europe are looking at going straight to ePub and with Adobe’s current support and eReader’s forthcoming transition, it maybe foolhardy of Amazon to try and shut down Mobi, especially when they may not be in a position to offer the Kindle there yet, not to mention how anti Competitive that may look (and the EU is not shy about investigating).

Yes restricting it in the US market is a distinct Possibility, and Amazon has shown sight of trying to do so, by

a) Trying to restrict people from buying DRM’s Mobi books from other sellers by disabling the Kindle PID’s on Mobipocket servers and more recently trying to prevent publication on information about KindlePID.py

b) trying to restrict competion in standalone hardware readers by preventing Astek from enabling Mobi support on the EZ Reader version of the Hanlin V3 wich can be legally marketed everywhere else in the world with DRM Mobi support (Look at this post http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=338770&postcount=1286 )

c) Might be pressuring Booken as well as they just announce on their blog that they are going to add support for Adobe DRM, which may mean losing support for Mobi Drm (One of the main reasons I bought the Gen 3)