The Mobipocket format: Starring Leonardo diCaprio and Kate Winslet

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Try manga in a traditional reader.

Has anyone tried manga on the Kindle? Just curious.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Has anyone tried manga on the Kindle? Just curious.

I've seen photos of manga on a 505. Given that it's the same screen, I would say manga would work quite well on any reader that uses the 6" Vizplex screen. But, the 505 does have the advantage of 8 shades vs. 4 for less dithering and a nicer image.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

It has various other problems...I've listed them before.

Right. I'm sure the decision was simply based on commercial/financial, not technical, issues.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

MobiPocket has taken the approach of fixing the small image problem by switching to JPEG images, but that leaves all the existing e-books with tiny GIF images (and many new ones as well, because publishers are slow to switch - in part because of compatibility concerns). MobiPocket should add a fix for legacy e-books, by scaling up small images. This won't be perfect, but better on large screens than leaving them unscaled.

MobiPockets demoexample has an gif that is 600x800 and that works OK on smaller deviced. Do you mean that jpg enabled use of larger images than 600x800?

[wallcraft]

The size in pixel's isn't the issue, it is the image size in KB that matters. For full color images, the average size of a 64 KB GIF is about 200x300 - but this size is highly variable and some 600x800 GIFs will fit in 64 KB. By default, the mobigen.exe program reduces the size of GIF images so the they fit in 64 KB by shrinking the image. If you use mobigen.exe -jpeg (and JPEG images), it reduces the size in bytes of the image by reducing its quality while maintaining its size in pixels. Since JPEGs are intrinsically more efficient than GIFs for many images, the 64 KB limit is less onerous for JPEGs.

I have screenshots showing the difference between LIT (unlimited size JPEGs) and PRC (limited byte size GIF/BMP) at the start of Images in MobiPocket. If you use mobigen.exe -jpeg on the LIT file you get essentially the same result as the original, and if you use mobigen.exe (without the -jpeg) on the LIT file I expect you would get essentially the same result as Baen's original PRC (very small images).

[jharker]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

The more important question is why the heck are Bokeen, Amazon and Irex all using it is their primary ebook format?

I'm not sure I would say that mobi is the iRex iLiad's primary format. The iLiad only got support for mobi fairly recently, and only (I assume) because it's the de facto ebook standard and iRex wants to support it.

The iLiad's primary format is pdf -- it was supported since day one. The iLiad can't reflow pdfs, but with its larger screen and stylus navigating letter/A4-sized pdfs is not too difficult, and they display pretty well.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by jharker

I'm not sure I would say that mobi is the iRex iLiad's primary format. The iLiad only got support for mobi fairly recently, and only (I assume) because it's the de facto ebook standard and iRex wants to support it.

The iLiad's primary format is pdf -- it was supported since day one. The iLiad can't reflow pdfs, but with its larger screen and stylus navigating letter/A4-sized pdfs is not too difficult, and they display pretty well.

A good point, unfortunately, encouraging people to keep ebooks in pdf format is even worse than encouraging them to use .mobi

[wallcraft]

The Kindle is using MOBI because Amazon owns the format. The reason that the iLiad and Cybook are using MOBI is that there are no alternatives. No other vendor of DRMed e-books yet has a Linux Reader, and the only other announced Reader is Adobe Digital Editions which is "coming soon" for Linux.

In defense of MOBI, I would say that it is primarily a format for displaying e-books - rather than a format for laying out and archiving e-books. Even in this role it has limitations. Its real test will be whether it can adapt to displaying epub e-books.

[jharker]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

A good point, unfortunately, encouraging people to keep ebooks in pdf format is even worse than encouraging them to use .mobi

Oh, yes, I completely agree. I didn't mean pdf is a good ebook format, I just meant that mobi isn't really the iLiad's "default" format.

Actually, it's kind of funny: the iLiad supported pdf first because it was originally designed for use by business people, who usually read documents in pdf format. iRex added mobi support later, probably as a response to the large number of users buying the iLiad for use as an e-book reader. But it wasn't designed for e-book reading in the first place...

In general I have to say that a modern, extensible, reflowable standard format for ebooks would be A Good Thing.

I wouldn't worry about mobi sticking around in the long term. Considering that the mobi format has no embedded font support, I expect we'll drop it as soon as e-books become popular in non-English languages...

[schmidt349]

The reason that the iLiad and Cybook are using MOBI is that there are no alternatives.

EPUB, XHTML/CSS, etc. In fine, there are plenty of reflowable text formatting schemes that are a heck of a lot easier to implement than Mobi. At the very least these are formats that don't rely on big-endian byte ordering :-D

[wallcraft]

I agree that MOBI isn't the easiest format to implement. Linux (or any O/S) would not be a issue if DRM was not in the picture. Only MobiPocket has Linux Reader software with DRM at present (Sony does too, but only on their own devices). This may be a marketing, rather than a technical, issue - but it is a real constraint on E-Ink devices.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

I agree that MOBI isn't the easiest format to implement. Linux (or any O/S) would not be a issue if DRM was not in the picture. Only MobiPocket has Linux Reader software with DRM at present (Sony does too, but only on their own devices). This may be a marketing, rather than a technical, issue - but it is a real constraint on E-Ink devices.

I'm afraid I disagree that this was the prime motivating factor for iRex and Bookeen to go with Mobi. The prime reason, almost certainly, was the fact that Mobi are by far the market leaders in the eBook world - they have more stores and more books than anyone else. What would be the point in releasing an eBook reader which had no books available for it? By going with Mobi, they've given their customers a vast range of books to choose from.

The typical customer doesn't give two hoots if the file format is technically a poor one; all they care about is whether or not they'll be able to buy the books they want to read. Mobi gives them that.

[schmidt349]

Yeah, until their DRM server crashes and doesn't come back up again this time so all your books are bricked.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by schmidt349

Yeah, until their DRM server crashes and doesn't come back up again this time so all your books are bricked.

Mobi's server crashing would not have the slightest effect on existing books; it would simply prevent you from buying new books, or encoding books that you've bought previously for a new device.

Since Mobi have been around longer than virtually anyone else in the business, I don't personally regard this as something that's likely to happen any time in the foreseeable future.

Since I rarely re-read books, I regard this as a complete "non issue". I buy books to read NOW - I don't particularly care whether or not I'll be able to re-read them in 20 years' time. How many of the books that you bought 20 years ago do you still have, and read, now?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by schmidt349

Yeah, until their DRM server crashes and doesn't come back up again this time so all your books are bricked.

This is misinformation. They did have a problem with a security breach at one point and shut down the server to fix it but this did NOT effect anyones ability to use the books they already owned. It did effect the ability to buy books for a while. It was, hopefully, a one time event and they have taken efforts to prevent it in the future.

Dale