Franklin sold its 16,765 ordinary shares in
Mobipocket to Amazon for about $2.5 million in cash and retired 29% of its outstanding preferred stock for $1 million. The company still has 2,434 preferred shares with a liquidation value of about $2.4 million outstanding.
What is this story about? Amazon is currently selling e-books in Microsoft .LIT and Adobe .PDF formats. The new deal could indicate that the Internet giant is planning to offer e-books in the proprietary Mobipocket format as well. For those who still don't know: Mobipocket is an ugly duckling among e-book formats, because its restrictive DRM format is incompatible with any other reader but Mobipocket (have you ever tried using Mobipocket with a WM2003SE Pocket PC? It doesn't look pretty!) and because it is "device-based", limiting the number of devices that can decrypt your purchased e-book.
[via
Teleread and
Philadelphia Business].