Mobipocket listing Kindle books?
By Paul Biba
Received the following email and picture from Greg. It poses an interesting question. Let’s keep an eye on it:
Hi Paul,
Was browsing the Mobipocket store latest releases in Suspense and Thrillers and Science Fiction I noticed that some books were described as “A Random House Kindle book”. Out of interest I downloaded a sample and it was in PRC format and readable in Stanza on my Mac. Half arsed maintenance or does it mean something more??
Regards,
Greg.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:49 am
Interesting…
Could be that Kindle compatibility is coming to Mobipocket Reader, thus opening up PCs, PDAs, and smartphones to the Kindle store.
It would take very little programming effort to enable Kindles to use MobiDRM and, conversely, MobiDRM apps and readers to plug into the Kindle store.
Or it could just be sloppy back-end server administration.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:36 am
If this is intentional on Amazon’s part, that could be sweet: Opening up their library to more devices is just what they should be doing.
Let’s see how this plays out.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:17 am
Mobipocket stopped accepting new account registrations in September, and now directs authors and publishers to the Digital Text Platform to upload their files. It appears that Amazon might have decided to consolidate the uploads into one system to reduce confusion and the double-posting on the Kindle store that was pretty common.
https://www.mobipocket.com/ebookbase/en/homepage/pub_info.asp
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Of course, you can read the free samples on Mobipocket on just about anything, as the free samples are DRM free. The only way to tell is to purchase the book to see if it works on your Mac, stanza, iphone etc. Let us know how it works out
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
According to my publisher, the Kindle format is a perverted .Mobi format.
Maybe they’re working on backwards compatibility?
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Well, perverted in the sense that they’ve added their own DRM code to the file, which isn’t that different from the MobiPocket PID system at root. Many of us felt that Amazon could have put their library into the MobiPocket store at any time, but refrained in order to drive the customers to Amazon. They may be taking steps to allow Mobi users to more easily switch between Amazon and Mobi’s stores, depending on their platform.
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Azw = Mobi, 100%.
DRM-free kindle books (and samples) are readable anywhere Mobi is rradable.
The DRM wrapper is 99% identical, too.
The only real differences are:
1- Mobipocket exposes its PID DRM key and Kindle does not.
2- Kindle PIDs (once exposed) include characters that are not accepted by (some) Mobi servers.
There is a script floating around that allows the calculation of a Kindle’s secret PID so that Mobi-DRM’ed books become readable on Kindle.
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Sounds to me that Random House was inputting its books and because Kindle is bigger for them than Mobipocket, they just stuck the Kindle label on it. For many publishers, at least, books go into Kindle through Mobipocket.
Rob Preece
Publisher