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By David Rothman

booksonboardsite “Mobipocket told us this morning that they hope to have Macmillan back for us and others by the end of the week.”

So reports Bob LiVolsi of BooksOnBoard in an e-mail to me. 

That’s great news in the wake of concerns that publishers might favor Amazon Kindle and Sony books—at the expense of independent booksellers such as BoB and Fictionwise that use the Mobipocket format. Amazon owns Mobi.

Fictionwise: No anti-trust prob in Amazon’s books below cost

Also see just-posted comments—mentioning the issue of Amazon and competitors from a legal viewpoint—from FW’s Steve Pendergrast. He says he does not see anti-trust law violations in Amazon’s below-cost pricing of best-sellers.

In addition, Steve thinks that the dropped feeds were “more of a clerical error in one case and part of a review of retailers in the other. One of them has already re-authorized us, and our expectation is the other should follow suit soon. I don’t think it has anything to do with Amazon.”

Bob L’s guess at this point: Feeds dropped by mistake

More on the dropped feeds. “It’s not clear what happened here,” says Bob LiVolsi, who, commendably, is not keen on a legal fight.

“I’m guessing it’s not conspiracy, but perhaps someone new at Macmillan did not know how to use the Mobipocket publisher interface, but this is only speculation. 

“The Mobipocket team in Paris is composed of very hard-working, committed people,” he says, “and they remain unequivocally supportive of their parent company in their communication to us.  The only weakness we’ve seen there is that Amazon does not seem to give them enough resources to keep up with the workload.” Bob adds he’s just speculating; the Mobipocket team has not said that. May Mobi get the extra resources if that’s what the people there need!

Meanwhile Laurent Picard at Bookeen, whose Cybook Gen3 Ink machine, uses Mobi format, has told me he believes that Amazon/Mobipocket will stand behind the format. Great! As much as I want the nonproprietary .epub standard to prevail in the end, we need to look out for readers and indie booksellers in the here and now.

Bottom line: Amazon and Mobi bear close watching, and we should worry about format-hardware-distribution connections. But whatever the reason for restoration (our TeleBlog posts?), BoB and others will get their Mobi feed of Macmillan back. Thanks, Mobi and/or Macmillan!

 
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