Mobipocket

Mobipocket.com SA is a French company incorporated in March 2000 which produces the Mobipocket Reader, a universal reader for PDAs. The Mobipocket software package is currently free to download from the official web site and consists of publishing and reading tools dedicated to PDA and Smartphone devices (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, BlackBerry and Psion). Mobipocket.com was bought by Amazon.com in 2005. ^[1]. The reasoning behind the acquisition was postulated as a result of Adobe's announcement that it would no longer sell its eBook packaging and serving software. ^[2] The company went offline for nine days, from 15 August 2007 until 24 August 2007, allegedly 'for maintenance' purposes, without informing either its customers or its content partners about the cause of the problem, or the expected duration of the outage while it was going on.^[3] The software provides:

• A personalized press review using the Mobipocket Web Companion, an automated content extraction tool dedicated to press articles.
• eBooks, including for each book a biography of the writer's life. Each downloaded eBook is registered in the My Mobipocket personal virtual library, from which a user has access to any previously-downloaded eBook.
• A secure reading system, as a result of the encryption of eBooks (using DRM) and unique signature, a timestamp added to each book at the time of purchase.

Mobipocket on a Psion Serie 5 PDA (with further information)

Depending on the device, different functions are available. Those are usually managing of books and their metadata, assigning books to arbitrary categories, auto-scroll, rotate by 90°/180°, bookmarks, custom hyperlinks within one or between different documents, highlighting, comments and by sketches. When transferring documents to other device types, functions that are not supported on the device will be ignored but the information one is reading will not be altered or deleted. There is a reader software version for personal computers running on Microsoft Windows. It allows you to import different file formats, among them HTML, PDF, OEB , CHM , TXT and Microsoft Office formats. This way, a user can create documents in the Mobipocket-format (.PRC) and use personal comments, bookmarks etc. on all devices supporting those features. Note that there is no way to print or export the text itself nor the personalized additions without manually selecting, copying and pasting them piece by piece. According to Mobipocket Support a print function will be released soon; an export feature is planned but not yet in an advanced stage as consultation with publishers continues.

Comparable Software

A listing of comparable electronic reader software can be found at e-books.org ^[4]. Ebooks.org is a non-commercial repository of information related to e-book research and products. Their mission is to encourage the sharing and analysis of ideas surrounding e-book reading appliances to create an accurate understanding of their possibilities and limitations. The list contains both reading and authoring software that can be downloaded. Most reading software is distributed as freeware while authoring software, with some exceptions are sold as shareware or outright purchase.

See also

• Comparison_of_e-book_formats: an overview of various e-book formats
• TomeRaider: an alternative with pay-for reader software
• Amazon Kindle: Amazon's e-Ink device which can read DRM-free Mobipocket files

References

External links

• Mobipocket.com (United States)
• Mobipocket reader

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