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Mobipocket now running on Blackberry’s Storm and Bold—but what about the iPhone? Dirty format-tricks from Amazon?
January 21, 2009 | 5:56 am
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By David Rothman
You can now read Mobipocket books on the BlackBerry Storm (9500 phone series) and Bold (9000 series), via Beta Build 80. MobileRead has details.
Progress! But it doesn’t eliminate an increasingly troublesome issue. Just when will Amazon, the owner of Mobipocket, wise up and give us Mobi on the iPhone?
The longer Amazon refuses to, the more credible are the theories that Amazon is worried sick about the iPhone as a Kindle threat and has deliberately prevented the good folks at Mobi from doing their job.
Wrong move. The Mobi/iPhone void sends an unwitting message that Amazon does fear the iPhone.
The big dissing: Amazon’s insult to iPhoners
No, the iPhone as an e-reader isn’t for everyone—many older people will want a larger screen. But if Amazon/Mobi can go to the trouble to show up on the latest BlackBerries, why does it keep dissing owners of the iPhone and Touch?
I hope that book publishers understand the damage that Jeff Bezos’s format tricks are doing to their business. Many readers have spent hundreds of dollars—maybe even thousands—on Mobipocket books. It’s clippy, clippy, clippy of Amazon not to let the books be usable on the iPhone. Amazon’s cheap format games detract from the permanence of e-books and make them less serious as a medium, or attractive as buys. Many younger people favor screens over paper. Publishers are deluding themselves if they think that unownable e-books aren’t a problem.
Yet another argument for ePub
Of course, this is yet another argument for the ePub e-book standard, ideally without DRM to muck it up, so that you can effortlessly read your e-books on a variety of ePub-capable devices, including those you buy in the future. To its vast credit, Amazon lets you convert ePub books to be displayed in Mobi. But so far you can’t read ePub books natively in Mobi or on the Kindle. What a disappointment. I hope that Oprah Winfrey, the world’s most famous Kindle booster, gets on the case and starts pushing ePub. After spending hundreds of dollars on their Kindles, which most users will want to replace sooner or later, Oprah’s fans deserve better treatment.
And speaking of Jeff’s dirty tricks in the format department: I wanted to share an ePub file with Court Merrigan, a Kindle owner. A snap, I thought. I’d just convert with Mobi Desktop, and then Court’s Kindle could read the nonencrypted Mobi. But no such luck. I’d forgotten that Amazon/Mobi had quietly cooked the Desktop app so the Kindle couldn’t read the Mobi output—even though earlier versions of Desktop produced Kindle-friendly Mobi. Kovid Goyal, creator of the Calibre program for e-book management, correctly calls Amazon’s tactics "ruthless."
Technorati Tags: Oprah Winfrey,Jeff Bezos
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Comments:
The Kindle can read DRM-free MOBIs generated from DRM-free ePubs by Windows MobiPocket Reader. The Reader does not always succeed in converting the ePub and does not always do a good conversion, but any resulting MOBI should be readable on the Kindle.
Calibre has an “any2mobi” command in beta test that already does a better ePub to MOBI conversion than MobiPocket’s tools. It should be fully integrated into Calibre within a month.
The latest Windows MobiPocket Reader does not recognize a Kindle connected via USB. So the Reader can’t be use to manage the Kindle’s ebooks. Once again, Calibre comes to the rescue with a recent upgrade that allows it to manage DRM-free ebooks on a Kindle via USB.
Hi, Alan. Great news re Calibre rescuing the Kindle owners re ePub.
Does this mean the Kindle can read ePub from the latest Mobipocket Windows Desktop at times? See See http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23466 .
So there is a problem in practical terms? Why do you think it can’t? Is that deliberate as you see it? Either way, this does not reflect well on Amazon. Conversion per se and the USB connection should both work reliably.
Thanks,
David
There have been assertions in Comments at a variety of sites that MobiPocket demands DRM exclusivity on hardware. Will Berry owners be shut out of, say, eReader now? Even though they co-existed merrily on Palm devices?
I’d like to know if there’s a 1-to-1 between K and Mobi eBooks. That is, does Amazon’s contract demand pubs approve *both* K and Mobi versions of each book?
Amazon is setting itself up for a nice Restraint of Trade suit by the FTC/DoJ. With this new Administration — which is digital savvy — one can hope that day arrives soon!
(Sorry if this is posted 2x. Teleread is burpy!)
Mike: MobiPocket requires DRM-exclusivity on dedicated reading devices when the software is pre-installed by the device vendor. This has been somewhat moot until recently, because MobiPocket was the only game in town for most vendors (Sony being the exception, because they were able to get Adobe to give the PRS-505 and PRS-700 priority). It seems that both eReader and Adobe Digital Editions software will soon be generally available for Linux-based EInk devices. So now the exclusivity deals start to matter.
MobiPocket can’t require anything on devices that don’t come with pre-installed reader software, but rather have reader software added by the user as a separate download. This is the case on all cell phones and PDAs including the BlackBerry.
The problem here is probably apples complete ban on flash and Java on the iphone, it’s just not an easy thing writing good crossplatform code without any java or flash, this means that while the blackberries, HTC winphones and nokia’s can share a port who even shares code with the iLiad ports while the iphone port must be written independently from scratch.
The iphone doesnt work with any other cross platform framework like WVwindows, QT or XUL either.
David: Windows MobiPocket Reader 6.0 recognises the Kindle via USB as a supported device type. That was most likely an oversight on MobiPocket’s part, because Amazon wants to manage the Kindle via Whispernet. Later versions of Windows MobiPocket Reader don’t recognise the Kindle (i.e. MobiPocket explicitly turned off this capability), and so can’t be used to manage ebooks on the Kindle.
Only Windows MobiPocket Reader 6.2 imports ePubs, but once the ePub has been converted to DRM-free MOBI it is just a file which can be manually transfered to the Kindle via USB (or emailed to Amazon for Whispernet transfer). If version 6.2 recognized the Kindle, it could do the transfer for you. That is what Calibre will soon provide, a seamless ePub to MOBI to Kindle via USB process all within a single application.