MobipocketLogo For quite some time, Mobipocket users have been clamoring for an official Mobipocket application for the iPhone (as well as Mac OS X Desktop, and Linux (desktop and mobile), which have gotten lumped together in the same Mobipocket forum thread). There are applications that read unencrypted Mobipocket files on these platforms, of course—Bookshelf (well) and Stanza (poorly) for the iPhone, FBReader for Mac (beta) and Linux—but without the ability to read encrypted Mobipocket, users of these platforms who purchase DRM-crippled books from Fictionwise, Mobipocket.com, or some other store will have no legal way to read them.

On the Mobipocket Suggestions forum, there are 33 total pages comprising almost 500 posts of people who want an official Mobipocket client for the iPhone, Mac, or Linux. There are posts from people upset that they were able to download a book sample that worked on their iPhone when the book itself would not. There is rampant paranoia that Amazon (who owns Mobipocket) is not allowing Mobipocket to create an iPhone reader for fear of increasing competition with their Kindle.

There is very little response of any kind from official Mobi representatives beyond “we don’t yet have a Reader for iPhone yet (sic)” or unhelpfully referring the questioner back to the monster thread of people demanding such an application.

But is Mobipocket actually working on such an application or not?

iPhone Mobipocket…by the End of the Year?

Mobipocket forum poster Nate the Great attended the International Digital Publishers’ Forum in May, and saw Mobipocket President & CEO Martin Gorner speak. According to Nate, “[Gorner said that by] the end of the year, Mobipocket will release updated readers for the various platforms, as well as release a new reader for the Apple iPhone.”

This claim led to much discussion on the Mobipocket forum and elsewhere (such as Mobileread), but as the year progressed, an odd thing became clear: none of the Mobipocket customer service people seemed to have any idea that such a thing was being worked on, nor were there any press releases touting it as one might expect for a product that would be unveiled in just a few short months.

At the beginning of October, I was finally curious enough to attempt some official contact with Mobipocket, in my capacity as a TeleRead blogger. But they did not make it easy to get in touch. Unlike almost any other company I have seen, their “Contact Us” page contains no telephone information at all—just a fax number, and links to post to their forum for other concerns.

To Corner M. Gorner

Fortunately, there are other ways. Since Gorner was the one who had made the remarks I was curious about, I spent some time searching the Internet for a contact phone number for him. (Not very much time, as it turned out; his phone number can be turned up in a number of places, including right here on TeleRead, just by googling “Martin Gorner” with “+33,” the international code for France.)

When I spoke briefly with Gorner, I found him quite affable and polite—though there was little he would actually tell me. When I asked Gorner about the iPhone application, he replied simply, “Our company is working on something, but I have no announcements to make at this point.”

When I asked whether he had actually said what Nate the Great had heard at the IPDF, he did not address the question, instead saying that “at this point there is no useful information I can give you. And since (sic) any non-useful information I could give you would only lead to speculation, which I would rather avoid.”

An Interesting Job Posting

Unfortunately, speculation is a part of the human condition. To indulge in some (with apologies to Gorner), if we take Gorner at his word, then Mobipocket is indeed “working on something,” but clearly unready to talk about it yet. Another piece of the puzzle is provided by Mobipocket forum poster josealino, who noticed a job posting on Mobipocket’s careers page.

The posting is in French, but a Google translation reveals that

In the R & D team, you participate in the development and product design Mobipocket Reader (player software for mobile platforms Palm OS / Windows Mobile / Symbian / Java and PC), Mobipocket Creator (software for creating electronic publications) for PC and Mac […]

It is interesting to note the “and Mac” in that description, given that Mobipocket reps’ prior responses to Mac requests have been on the order of “Porting our reader to Mac OS X is a big peace (sic) of work. And even if the number of Mac users is growing, it is still around 3.5% of internet (sic) users.” And apparently the desktop OS X and the version the iPhone runs are similar enough that once a reader is ported to one, it will be easily converted to the other.

Is Mobipocket now looking to hire someone to help them port the Mobipocket reader to the Macintosh? It is tempting to think so. But on the other hand, a quick check of archive.org reveals the same posting, or a very similar one, was at the same URL in December, 2007.

The Amazon Angle

One oft-heard refrain of posters on the Mobipocket forum is the paranoia that Amazon, who is now Mobipocket’s parent company, does not want Mobipocket available on the iPhone. They think Amazon fears loss of sales to its Kindle (which also uses the Mobipocket file format) if encrypted Mobipocket books can be bought freely by the growing army of iPhone users.

I am inclined to look on this scenario with some doubt. If Amazon really didn’t want Mobipocket competing with the Kindle, they could outright kill the encrypted Mobipocket format altogether—force Mobi to stop licensing the encryption to e-tailers such as Fictionwise. Without encryption, publishers would be much more hesitant to sell their books that way, and there would be fewer e-books to compete with the Kindle.

Why haven’t they done that? Since Amazon owns Mobipocket, money earned by Mobipocket is money earned by Amazon. Amazon must recognize that many of the people who buy Mobipocket books would not buy a Kindle, especially if Amazon were to kill the format off. Thus, they continue letting Mobipocket license the encryption, because that is how Mobipocket makes money. Killing off Mobipocket would mean killing off a reve
nue stream without necessarily increasing their other revenue streams to compensate.

Likewise, Amazon must surely be aware that many of the people who have iPhones and iPod Touches would not dream of buying a Kindle. It would make sense, then, to have an iPhone reader so that more encrypted books could be bought by iPhone users, and hence more money come in to Mobipocket.

We outsiders have no way of knowing what constraints a Mobipocket iPhone development team might be working under. With that in mind, I believe that there are more than enough reasons internal to Mobipocket that an iPhone reader could have been delayed without attributing it to malice on the part of Amazon.

As Hard as All That?

Mobi’s representatives’ responses to a request for Mobipocket on the Macintosh/iPhone platform have ranged from explanations of how difficult it would be to cryptic comments like mobi_aurelien’s “Thanks for all the comments you give us for those platforms…, sorry these platforms 🙂 .”

But that “difficulty” does not seem to have stopped other programmers. There are a number of applications that can read unencrypted books in Mobipocket format. Linux and the OS X desktop (not to mention a number of mobile Linux platforms Mobipocket does not deign to support) are served by FBReader, an open-source program, and the iPhone is served by Bookshelf and Stanza. These programs all work very well, and are constantly improving as their programmers continue to revise them.

Even support for Mobipocket encryption would not be particularly hard to implement in an existing application. In a forum post, Bookshelf programmer Zachary Bedell writes, “I’m ready to add Mobi DRM within days of getting permission. There are no technical challenges to implementing it—only legal ones.”

Bedell posted a query about it on Mobipocket’s forum, and they promised to contact him by mail but apparently never did. Without a legal fund to back him up, Bedell dares not risk implementing it without their approval.

Without an “authorized” Mobipocket client on the iPhone, Mac desktop, or Linux, those who use those platforms must be either content to read only unencrypted Mobipocket books (from Baen Webscriptions or Fictionwise Multiformat, for example), or prepared to crack the encryption on encrypted Mobipocket books they buy.

The tool to accomplish this crack, a bundle of Python scripts called mobidedrm, can be obtained with just a few minutes of googling. However, using it is illegal in some areas, such as the United States, due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and similar laws. 

An Educated Guess

If I were to speculate (sorry Martin) on the state of a Mobipocket reader for iPhone, this is what I would guess. I would guess that what Martin Gorner said at the IPDF in May was true, at the time. When Gorner said it, Mobipocket did indeed intend to have an iPhone client ready by the end of the year. But a lot can change in six months.

There are fewer than thirty days remaining until the “end of the year” deadline, and Mobipocket has been remarkably mum about its putative iPhone client development. There have been no posts by Mobipocket representatives that indicate if or when such a thing is coming. (It is tempting to read into the rep’s statement quoted above that they do not have an iPhone client “yet,” but then again, just because the sun has not burned out “yet” is no reason to expect it to happen within our lifetimes.)

I do not have any way of knowing whether the plans to produce an iPhone client by the end of the year have fallen through, or whether Mobipocket has just been very, very quiet about them. If we take Gorner at his word, they are “working on something,” but I would have thought that if the plans were proceeding apace, there would have been an announcement of some kind, or Gorner would have mentioned the iPhone client somewhere else by now.

It is possible there could be a press release touting an iPhone Mobipocket client tomorrow, but I suspect it is more likely the iPhone Mobipocket reader has been delayed. I doubt it would have been canceled outright, but only time will tell.

However, the iPhone platform has started receiving a lot of great publicity as an e-book reader, largely thanks to Fictionwise’s eReader and the success of Stanza in signing up publishers to its platform. The longer Mobipocket waits to take advantage of this burgeoning market, the further it will fall behind.

11 COMMENTS

  1. Let me ask some questions here:

    1) For all the people who are experiencing eBooks for the first time on the iPhone with eReader and Stanza, is this even an issue?

    2) Is there anything in the MobiPocket file format that makes it preferable to others, say, ePub?

    I’ve said it before: This is a legacy format and the sooner people move away from it, the better.

  2. 1) Perhaps not. But let’s bear in mind that even on Fictionwise—the owners of eReader and one of the main drivers of commercial e-books on the iPhone—there are still a surprising number of books that are available in encrypted Mobipocket format only because of publisher restrictions.

    It’s all well and good to say, “Well, don’t buy them, then.” But for people who want those books electronically and want to support the author and publisher who brought them out, what other choice do they have?

    2) Right or wrong, the presence of DRM makes it preferable to publishers. It may be due to complete stupidity on their part, given how broken Mobipocket DRM is, but it’s what they want.

    And official Mobipocket reader software is available for a pretty decent variety of handheld devices—including the Blackberry, which is currently the only smartphone ahead of the iPhone in the American market (see the article I posted after this one)—not to mention also being used in the Kindle. This means that a lot of people moving to an iPhone from something Mobi supports will have a lot of legacy files to bring along.

  3. I think the bigger reason is that it costs Amazon less money to maintain an already existing mobipocket format than it would to open up the Kindle to non-USA customers. It continues to baffle me that they won’t do this, and in my opinion the Kindle has no hope of being taken seriously as a ‘gold standard’ and owning this niche market as long as they stubbornly remain unuseable outside of the USA. A *lot* of people—readers, even!—are not American. It’s the *world* wide web. Any ‘industry standard’ for an electronic product needs to realize this, and soon.

  4. Chris,
    The publishers may want DRM, but it is frankly anti-consumer technology. My position is simple, I will not support a publisher that publishes DRM’d books. We should not want to support a publisher that doesn’t trust us enough to let us read our books where and how we want!

    The Blackberry to iPhone transition is a clear example of one reason why we should oppose DRM! When you buy DRM’d books, you have no way of knowing whether you will be able to read them on your next smart-phone, computer or ebook-reader. The last thing I want to worry about when I buy a computer or new smart-phone is about whether I will be able to read my ebooks on them.

  5. Maybe Amazon (the owner) is afraid that if Mobipocket is available for the iPhone they’ll see sales of the Kindle (which is, let’s face it, a “geek” device…but not as sexy as another “geek” device, the iPhone) drop.

    Put an iPhone and a Kindle next to each other. Which looks nicer? Which is more user-friendly?

  6. I myself have a love/hate relationship with my ebooks. Half of my library is eReader/Fictionwise and the other is Mobipocket. There are many and varied reasons why I choose to support both formats. Some include:

    -One of my authors’ publisher started releasing her books in eReader. Then 6 books ago did a 180 and now ONLY release in Mobipocket.

    -One of the websites I buy from doesn’t support eReader at all. The format is not available.

    etc.

    Did anyone notice the new “lending library” that Fictionwise is testing? Whoops! You can only use MOBIPOCKET software with it. You have to have the platform to take advantage. I love my itouch, but I’m starting to get more then a little annoyed.

  7. Of course, Mobipocket library books’ DRM can be removed by the same method as Mobipocket sale books.

    And unlike sale books, you don’t have to pay for them first.

    Just another one of the flaws inherent in trying to make electronic books mimic paper books to such a great extent.

  8. I’ve used ebooks for the past 4 years. I love my iphone and use Stanza and Ereader. My problem is that there seems to be more publishers who now use the secure Mobipocket format. I don’t understand why Mobipocket doesn’t understand the secure format decreases sales. I’ve bought more print books in the past year simply because the only ebook format was Mobipocket secure. It is frustrating to read the responses on the Mobipocket forum regarding the Mac OS and the iphone.

  9. Mobipocket doesn’t care. They don’t have to care. They get paid when someone uses their encryption, not when the book sells. (Well, they get paid when the book sells through the Mobipocket.com book store, but that’s just a sideline to their main business of making the reader software and selling the right to use the encryption.)

    It’s the publishers who need to be convinced it’s a toxin, because they’re the ones who make the decision to use it.

  10. According to the threads on the Mobi forum, not only development for OSX/iPhone but Mobi development in general has been moribund for several months now. Like other posters here and on the fora, I have hundreds of “Secure Mobipocket” books, bought either because the title was only available in that format, or because Mobipocket ran on my previous device. Both categories are significant, because for some peculiar reason some publishers will ONLY release as Mobi DRM, and because Mobipocket was a leading ereader, certainly better than eReader on my Palm T3 at that time.

    It no longer seems worthwhile to wait for Mobipocket to wake up and smell the coffee. Natural selection is passing them by.

    It’s a pity, because the Mobi app. I used on my Palm T3 was really good work. I respect those developers, and I hope wherever they are now, that their lives are rewarding and rewarded.

  11. You should also know that the top line nokias, n95, 97, etc., are also not availalbe in mobi.

    Since Amazon owns mobi that means they have the clout to force publishers to use ONLY their encryption. The Kindle absolutely competes with these new mobile devices, in a big way. I was going to buy a kindle until I recently disovered the ebook potential on my n97z now I dont see the point. Given the migration of all devices to the cell phone, I wouldnt be surprised if Amazon is working on a kindle phone, in fact they must, if they want to stay competitive.

    Given the master/servant relationship that amazon is developing with publishers, I dont think we have achoice but to grin and bear it and wait for the kindle phone. Or we can try more illegal downloads and teach thoses bastards a lesson!

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