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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Mobi has announced plans for an iPhone/iTouch port. Lack of support for OS/X is inexplicable. Since the iPhone/iTouch apparently use a mobile version of OS/X, we may see Mac support, too. It would be nice...
Mobi actually did release an alpha of the command line Mobigen book creator app for Linux, and have a Java version of the reader for mobile devices, so a Java reader for Linux is a possibility.
Mobi's problem is being a small shop with limited development resources. There are an assortment of platforms it would be nice to have Mobi running on, but who is going to do the port?
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I don't buy the "Mobi is a small shop" argument"; they are owned by Amazon!
If the development group for Mobi is small, it is small because Amazon wants it that way. Shoot, I can't imagine Stanza and eReader development teams are any larger than Mobi's, and they have both produced very credible readers for both OSX and the iPhone/Pod.
I think it basically comes down to this. Amazon is in the market of producing and selling the Kindle and books for the Kindle. Mobi was bought so Amazon could adapt their technology to the Kindle, and then make sure that Kindle Books could not be read anywhere but on Kindles. (Strike 1 in my book). They of course license the Mobi software to other vendors, but only if they agree not to also support other DRM'd content. By keeping most of the devices down to Mobi devices, they can hope that ultimately users of such devices can upgrade to Kindles when they are released in different countries. Ultimately, the iPod Touch/iPhone, because of its popularity, has a real chance to become the dominant player in the eBook market. The last thing Amazon wants to do is undermine Kindle sales ... I think, ultimately, they held off on the development of an iPhone version because they were afraid it would eat into Kindle sales. Now that eReader, Stanza and Bookshelf are getting a lot of attention (not to mention lots of sales of eBooks for eReader) they are promising to come into the market.
The problem for Mobi (but I think a win for eReading in general) is that it may already be too late for them to capture the bulk of e-Book readers on the iPod Touch. The only people who really care about it are the people who already have a significant DRM'd Mobi Library. The rest of us, are happily enjoying reading on our little iPods.
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It has the most friendly DRM scheme, but content creation is a bit more problematic. Mobipocket essentially uses encapsulated HTML. eReader uses PML, which is an unrelated markup language. The DropBook command line eReader book converter is free, but you have to have PML content to feed it, and automated solutions for creating that are scarce. (There is a Word macro package or two that will generate a PML file from a word document.)
Mobi Creator is freeware, and can take Word documents, PDF files, HTML, and text files as input and spit out a Mobi file. Some things work better than others (PDF conversion is erratic), but it's possible to feed Creator a source file and get a Mobi file without doing anything to the source file. eReader takes a bit more doing.
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Dennis
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Shoot Dennis, if that is all it takes, just give me the specs, and I will see what I can do... I won't touch Word and maybe not PDF... but it should be easy enough to write a script that will convert txt and html to pml which then can be piped to DropBook.
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Bill