Mobipocket

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Please improve this article if you can. (February 2007)
Mobipocket.com
Type Public
Founded 2000
Headquarters Paris
Key people Thierry Brethes, Founder ; Nathalie Ting, Founder ; Martin Görner , CEO
Industry Software
Products Mobipocket Reader

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, Smartphone and e-book devices (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, BlackBerry, Psion and iLiad). Mobipocket.com was bought by Amazon.com in 2005. [1].

Amazon's acquisition was believed to be 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)
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. Mobipocket books can be read on Mac OS X using Lexcycle Stanza, a 3rd party program.

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.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Franklin sells interest in company, retires shares - Philadelphia Business Journal:
  2. ^ DRM Watch: Amazon.com Acquires Mobipocket
  3. ^ Mobipocket site still down | Mobility Site

[edit] External links


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