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Originally Posted by bhartman36
Stanza has the advantage of already working with the iPhone and iPod Touch (a not-small install base). And Stanza can already export to Mobipocket (allowing Stanza to support every device Mobipocket supports) so there's no reason at all to try to tweak Mobipocket to work with the iPhone or iPod Touch. Why bother with that, when you can get everything in one package, with no development time?
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As Nate has already pointed out, the Amazon iPhone app is based on Mobipocket code, making the acquisition of Stanza irrelevant as far as having a reader on the iPhone is concerned.
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The change from .mobi to .azw is a fairly trivial one, actually. The difference is with protected files. And there was a reason for that: The AZW format is more compressed than plain vanilla MOBI. (I have no way of knowing for sure, but I assume that's a consequence of Whispernet.)
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Having reverse enginnered both formats, I on the other hand know for sure that AZW and MOBI are identical. They both support the same 3 levels of compression. My point was that by simply renaming mobi to azw Amazon indicated their intention of not further developing the MOBI format. In other words, they smothered Mobipocket, the ebook company they took over before Stanza.
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What's negative press got to do with anything? It's not like they got wonderful press by buying Lexcycle. Generally speaking, Amazon does what it wants and lets the chips fall where they may. Kind of the way Apple works.
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Since neither of us can look into the minds of Amazon's decision makers, arguiing about their motivation is futile. I just think that given their evident desire to achieve ebook monopoly, it is far more probable that they allowed the Kindle to read non DRMed formats from their fear of negative consumer reaction, had they not.
Or are you claiming that Amazon does not care at all about the consumer experience of people using their products?
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Buying Stanza gives them a leg up on it, though. Now they've got two readers on the iPhone, without having to break much of a sweat. What's more, they've got access to other computer platforms (Mac and Linux, and iPhone/iPod Touch) that they didn't have before with Mobipocket.
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I do wish you'd bother to do a little research before posting.
Stanza doesn't run on linux. Mobipocket does run on the iPhone (which runs OS X) and that means it runs on OS X. Indeed, given that it is written in Java, porting it to another platform is relatively trivial.
And if you believe that having multiple instances of reader software on the same platform is some sort of advantage, I have a few Nigerian stocks I'd like to sell you.