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Mobipocket has held up with heavy use, on everything from Dickens to Doc Savage. I’m to the point of suggesting that librarians, publishers and others lean heavily on distributors to get in Mobipocket pronto to replace Adobe dreck or at least offer a better alternative. You think Adobe is torture when you struggle with it on your desktop? Try it on a kinda-slow Sony PDA. By contrast, Mobipocket most of the time runs almost as briskly on my 33-megahertz Clie as it does on my 300-megahertz Dell Axim. The only time I really notice the speed difference is when I’m using the scroll bar across vast stretches of the books I’m reading; and even then it’s tolerable. Adobe not!

Granted, Adobe is a “safe” standard, and some distributors and publishers and even librarians like the related DRM system. Actually, however, as an effective repellant of many human readers, Adobe is dangeous. It just might turn some mild-mannered library enthusiasts into Walt Crawfords inside. Libraries may not get that many complaints. But that’s probably because people’s expectations for e-books are so low nowadays that they can’t envision better possibilities. What’s more, they may just plain give up without even bothering to phone or e-mail for help. Young PDA-toting readers have better things to do with their lives than wait for supportgrams. In Adobe Readerland it’s generally each man or woman, boy or girl for himself or herself–since the company won’t provide phone support to mere mortals suffering this product.

Better reads

While I had problems while breaking in the latest Mobipocket, the reading experience is so much better than with Adobe, Microsoft Reader and PalmReader. Aesthetically and functionally, Mobipocket leaves the others behind. Furthermore, Scott Pendergrast of Fictionwise has said that Mobipocket seems more reliable than other programs with copy-protection. That should please librarians and others hoping to downhold support costs. Coincidentally or not, OverDrive recently said it would offer the Mobipocket format for libraries and other clients (not sure what the schedule of this will be). eBookAd is another convert.

The advantages of Mobipocket go on and on. If you’re using Mobipocket on a Pocket PC tethered to a PC–I’m not sure about the deal with Palm-OS PDAs–you can even import your favorite fonts from the other machine.

No nirvana, but beats the others

Mind you, like other proprietary readers, Mobipocket isn’t nirvana. No phone support from the company itself. Also, Mobipocket is not as good with Gutenberg-style ASCII as I’d like. Too many line breaks happen helter-skeler. But that matters a bit less now that 10,000 eBooks, just renamed to Manybooks.net with a matching URL, is around with HTML as one of the formats offered. Yes, you can import HTML into Mobipocket. Not perfect but good enough. Even better, Black Mask offers free classics in Mobipocket format.

One negative is that if you want extras such as the ability to read with your PDA screen across rather than up and down, you’ll have to cough up $20 or so. Same with some commercial rivals. Not to mention the time you must invest installing, learning and maintaining each of the proprietary readers if you don’t want to be left out. Also, Mobipocket itself is far from as compliant with OeBPF’s tech standards under the hood as it should be.

Still, from this human reader’s perspective, it’s the best of the proprietary reading systems out there and, for picky folks, is well worth the money for the deluxe version. Let’s just hope that a UCF happens soon, and that software people can give up the format games and compete on usability of e-book-reading programs–an area in which Mobipocket, despite its flaws, has a head start.

 
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