Mobipocket SA was a French company incorporated in March 2000 that created the .mobi e-book file format and produced the Mobipocket Reader software for

mobile phone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...

personal digital assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA) is a multi-purpose mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. Following a boom in the 1990s and 2000s, PDAs were mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of more highly capable smar ...

s (PDA) and desktop operating systems. The Mobipocket software package was free and consisted of various publishing and reading tools for PDAs,

smartphones A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as mult ...

, mobile phones, the

e-reader An e-reader, also called an e reader or e device, is a Mobile computing, mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and Periodical literature, periodicals. Any device that can display text on ...

s Kindle and

iLiad The ''Iliad'' (; , ; ) is one of two major Ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the ''Odyssey'', the poem is divided into 24 books and ...

, and applications on devices using

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS ...

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) is a discontinued mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. ...

Java ME Java Platform, Micro Edition or Java ME is a computing platform for development and deployment of porting, portable code for embedded system, embedded and mobile devices (micro-controllers, sensors, gateways, mobile phones, personal digita ...

and Psion. Amazon.com bought Mobipocket.com in 2005 and kept it running until October 2016, when it permanently shut down the Mobipocket website and servers.

History

Amazon.com bought Mobipocket.com in 2005. An

alpha release The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

of the Java-based version of the Mobipocket reader became available for cellphones on June 30, 2008. There is also a reader for desktop computers running

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, which also works with computers running

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

using

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

. Since Amazon's acquisition of Mobipocket, software support, user support, and platform growth ended. In December 2011, Amazon reportedly officially notified book publishers that it was ending support for Mobipocket. The status of Mobipocket

digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...

(DRM) content previously purchased by users was unclear since no other eBook-reader supported its proprietary DRM method. On October 31, 2016,

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

permanently shut down the Mobipocket website and servers.

Design

The software provided: *A personalized press review using the Mobipocket Web Companion, an automated content extraction tool dedicated to press articles. *

eBook An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. A ...

s, including for each book a biography of the writer. Each downloaded eBook was registered in the My Mobipocket personal virtual library, from which a user had 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 A timestamp is a sequence of characters or encoded information identifying when a certain event occurred, usually giving date and time of day, sometimes accurate to a small fraction of a second. Timestamps do not have to be based on some absolu ...

added to each book at the time of purchase. Depending on the device, different functions were available, including managing of books and their

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

, assigning books to arbitrary categories, auto-scroll, rotate by 90° or 180°, bookmarks, custom

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to Data (computing), data by a user (computing), user's point and click, clicking or touchscreen, tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to ...

s within one or between different documents, highlighting, comments and by sketches. When transferring documents to other device types, functions that were not supported on the device were ignored, but the information one was reading would not have been altered or deleted. Each book had one or two language attribute(s); in the latter case it was meant to be a dictionary. As a typical example, reading a book in Fr language, a word may have been selected and asked to translate with Fr → En dictionary provided the appropriate dictionary was installed on the reader-device. Dictionaries were always unidirectional so Fr → En dictionary could not be used in reverse a separate En → Fr dictionary was needed for that.

Implementations

There was a reader for

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

s that worked with either encrypted or unencrypted Mobipocket books. Unencrypted Mobipocket books could be read on the

Amazon Kindle Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers designed and marketed by Amazon. Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, Audible audiobooks, and other digital media via wireless networking ...

natively, as well as in Amazon Kindle programs on

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

devices, Android devices,

, and

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft Mobile for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design languag ...

devices. By using third-party programs such as Lexcycle Stanza, calibre or Okular, unencrypted Mobipocket books could also be read on Mac OS X, iOS, Android devices and

. Third party tools existed to decrypt encrypted Mobipocket books, allowing them to be read using software that does not support encryption. A user could thus create documents in the Mobipocket format .mobi and use personal comments, bookmarks, and more on all devices supporting those features. Additionally, Amazon offered a free program called KindleGen that could convert or create documents in the Mobipocket format. This program was, however discontinued in the year 2020. An alternative application, called Kindle Previewer, was launched by Amazon shortly after in replacement of KindleGen with all the same features, in addition to other new features. User-added information, such as annotations and bookmarks, were kept in separate ".mbp" files by the official Mobipocket Reader and Kindle applications. In October 2012, Amazon also introduced an encrypted variant of the file (".smbp"), preventing access to the information by third-party applications. Owners of Android devices could download

's Kindle application from the Android App store, which could read .mobi files, though no official Mobipocket reader for the Android platform was released.

Legacy

The Amazon Kindle's AZW format (

Kindle File Format Kindle File Format is a proprietary e-book file format created by Amazon.com that can be downloaded and read on devices like smartphones, tablets, computers, or e-readers that have Amazon's Kindle app. E-book files in the Kindle File Format ...

) shares a substantial similarity with the Mobipocket format, distinguished primarily by serial number representation (making use of an

asterisk The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , , "little star", is a Typography, typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star (heraldry), heraldic star. Computer scientists and Mathematici ...

instead of a

dollar sign The dollar sign, also known as the peso sign, is a currency symbol consisting of a Letter case, capital crossed with one or two vertical strokes ( or depending on typeface), used to indicate the unit of various currency, currencies around ...

). In late 2011, the Kindle Fire introduced "Kindle Format 8" (KF8), also known as AZW3 file format that supported a subset of

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

and CSS3 features, while acting as a container for a backwards-compatible MOBI content document."Amazon Throws A Minor Curveball With HTML5-Powered Kindle Format 8"
, TechCrunch, October 20, 2011.

References

External links