Comments on: Mobipocket listing Kindle books?

By: Rob Preece, Publisher

Rob Preece, Publisher — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:39:27 +0000

Sounds to me that Random House was inputting its books and because Kindle is bigger for them than Mobipocket, they just stuck the Kindle label on it. For many publishers, at least, books go into Kindle through Mobipocket.

Rob Preece
Publisher

By: Felix Torres

Felix Torres — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:16:54 +0000

Azw = Mobi, 100%.
DRM-free kindle books (and samples) are readable anywhere Mobi is rradable.

The DRM wrapper is 99% identical, too.
The only real differences are:
1- Mobipocket exposes its PID DRM key and Kindle does not.
2- Kindle PIDs (once exposed) include characters that are not accepted by (some) Mobi servers.

There is a script floating around that allows the calculation of a Kindle’s secret PID so that Mobi-DRM’ed books become readable on Kindle.

By: Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:41:46 +0000

Well, perverted in the sense that they’ve added their own DRM code to the file, which isn’t that different from the MobiPocket PID system at root. Many of us felt that Amazon could have put their library into the MobiPocket store at any time, but refrained in order to drive the customers to Amazon. They may be taking steps to allow Mobi users to more easily switch between Amazon and Mobi’s stores, depending on their platform.

By: Heather S. Ingemar

Heather S. Ingemar — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:44:46 +0000

According to my publisher, the Kindle format is a perverted .Mobi format.

Maybe they’re working on backwards compatibility?

By: Dave Jenkins

Dave Jenkins — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:20:23 +0000

Of course, you can read the free samples on Mobipocket on just about anything, as the free samples are DRM free. The only way to tell is to purchase the book to see if it works on your Mac, stanza, iphone etc. Let us know how it works out

By: Joshua Tallent

Joshua Tallent — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:17:03 +0000

Mobipocket stopped accepting new account registrations in September, and now directs authors and publishers to the Digital Text Platform to upload their files. It appears that Amazon might have decided to consolidate the uploads into one system to reduce confusion and the double-posting on the Kindle store that was pretty common.

https://www.mobipocket.com/ebookbase/en/homepage/pub_info.asp

By: Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:36:43 +0000

If this is intentional on Amazon’s part, that could be sweet: Opening up their library to more devices is just what they should be doing.

Let’s see how this plays out.

By: Felix Torres

Felix Torres — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:49:06 +0000

Interesting…
Could be that Kindle compatibility is coming to Mobipocket Reader, thus opening up PCs, PDAs, and smartphones to the Kindle store.
It would take very little programming effort to enable Kindles to use MobiDRM and, conversely, MobiDRM apps and readers to plug into the Kindle store.
Or it could just be sloppy back-end server administration.