Mobipocket to officially close at last

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by crashnburn

PS: In terms of "preview" Pane in Windows Explorer, not within Calibre App, is that possible?

I've not used windows since 2016 for everyday stuff. I never had a preview icon for ebooks, but added a plug-in to Explorer on XP to show a preview icon for PDFs. Really slow.

I remember Win7 and Win10 had the terrible preview pane in Explorer. A crazy idea and massively destroys the ability to sensibly browse files. I turned it off.
My son has a Win10 / Linux dual boot PC for games. He uses a laptop with Linux for anything else. I have some XP VMs on Linux and VERY occasionally I boot my old Win XP box or Win 7 box for games (without Internet connections).
I have Steam now on Linux Mint on the Lenovo E460 i5 laptop, with the sole Win7 game I bought working on it natively (3D GPU too).

I never browse my ebook directories except to select the most recent downloads (sort by last modified) and import them to Calibre which creates a copy. So I only view/browse/search my ebooks within the main Calibre GUI, which has a nice instant preview of the cover. Far far faster than Win7 Explorer with Preview (for things it DID preview before I killed it. I did have Win7 & Linux dual boot on the Lenovo E460 laptop for a month or maybe two and then I deleted all the non-user files on that partition and converted it from NTFS to Ext4 (after backing up all my precious files copied from the old laptop to Win7 when I got it).

[binaryhermit]

I wonder if anyone else realized that until today it'd been almost 5 years since there was a post in this thread

[John F]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

I wonder if anyone else realized that until today it'd been almost 5 years since there was a post in this thread

I wonder if people notice, but don't think it worth mentioning.

[crashnburn]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

I wonder if anyone else realized that until today it'd been almost 5 years since there was a post in this thread

I did. But sometimes when its knowledge of an old app, that was still existing on a machine, it makes sense to collect the information on same thread, rather than create a new one with half the data.

I installed it way back and now found that its been dead and bought. Such is life.

[JSWolf]

Given that this thread is so old, I would doubt anyone has Mobipocket or Mobipocket Creator. We use Calibre or Kindle Gen with KindleUnpack for Calibre to create a Mobipocket eBook.

But I would find most people here don't care about Mobi eBooks.

[macminer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I would doubt anyone has Mobipocket .

I still do. I use it exclusively as an e-dictionary interface. I have bought a couple of good dictionaries in the mobipocket format and only Mobipocket can use these as standalone and fully functional dictionaries, even though Kindle or other apps that understand Mobi can read them (treating them as ordinary ebooks).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by macminer

I still do. I use it exclusively as an e-dictionary interface. I have bought a couple of good dictionaries in the mobipocket format and only Mobipocket can use these as standalone and fully functional dictionaries, even though Kindle or other apps that understand Mobi can read them (treating them as ordinary ebooks).

It's time to let go of those dictionaries and move on.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

I wonder if anyone else realized that until today it'd been almost 5 years since there was a post in this thread

It's probably been even longer than that since Mobipocket itself was bought out by Amazon. I know I used the Mobi format on My Franklin Ebookman reader back in the day. Terrible battery life (four hours) and dot matrix style typeface but I liked being able to use it back in the day. Probably have it somewhere in a box. Kindle is a lot better in so many ways.

[Quoth]

Mobipocket was French. About 2000. Major ebook seller for PDAs.
Amazon bought them in 2005, but it took till 2007 for their subsidiary Lab126 to produce the first Kindle (eInk), using the mobipocket format, which was inferior to Sony's eInk reader. Sony's Librie in 2004 was the first commercial eInk ereader, so you could say buying Mobi was part of Amazon's plan to compete.

In the end Sony transferred ebook customer base to Kobo and stopped making ereaders as they couldn't compete with Amazon's aggressive book & ebook retailing. Amazon now have more than 80% of USA online paper sales and have bought up publishers and have 90% of English ebook sales worldwide. Other retailers are calling on the USA FTC to investigate Amazon, Amazon Prime, Amazon Web Dark UI, Kindle Unlimited and exclusive terms of KDP Select.

Sony left the ereader market in 2014, further eink devices were for corporate "digital paper use". The last actual ereader by Sony was in 2013.
Sony announced ebook store closures on 6th February 2014 with customers transferred to Kobo.

Early Sony ereaders didn't do ePub and the model range just before the PRS650 and PRS350 etc had to be shipped to Sony to get FW upgrade for epub (PRS300, 500, 600 etc discontinued in 2010).

Sony switched to Android from Linux at the end of August 2011 with the release of the PRS-T1, which even after firmware updates has a dictionary triggered bug.

Sony made the mistake of predicating the success of their ereader on having their own online store for ebooks. They should have persuaded the publishers to do it and concentrated only on HW. They made a similar mistake with added DRM and the minidisc.

Amazon concentrated on retailing and sold ebooks before they had the Kindle. Now with more than 1/2 of ebooks read on apps and Amazon's dominance of Audiobooks with Audible, the eink Kindle is a mere accessory.

The 2010 approx PRS350, PRS650 and PRS950 are far superior to the Kindle models then. I have a PRS350 and it's better than the last Kindle Basic without front light (same number of pixels).

[graycyn]

The Sony readers were great! I still have my T2, and just this week loaded an ePub 3 on it. The ebook worked fine on the old reader, in spite of having 3 high quality and decent resolution (around 2200 pixels high by 1500 pixels wide) images to contend with.

Every once in a while I think about selling my last Sony reader, but then I think, nah, it can live its life out here.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by graycyn

The Sony readers were great! I still have my T2, and just this week loaded an ePub 3 on it. The ebook worked fine on the old reader, in spite of having 3 high quality and decent resolution (around 2200 pixels high by 1500 pixels wide) images to contend with.

Every once in a while I think about selling my last Sony reader, but then I think, nah, it can live its life out here.

I still mess around with my old Nook Simple Touch from time to time. Even with the 800X600 Pearl screen, I could still use it.

The only problem it has with ePub is needing all the margins in the stylesheet. The newer 'margin: 1em 0 0' confuse it.

Ereaders age a lot better than other old tech.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I still mess around with my old Nook Simple Touch from time to time. Even with the 800X600 Pearl screen, I could still use it.

The only problem it has with ePub is needing all the margins in the stylesheet. The newer 'margin: 1em 0 0' confuse it.

Ereaders age a lot better than other old tech.

I still have my old nook STR and there is no way I could use it. It's awful in almost every way.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I still have my old nook STR and there is no way I could use it. It's awful in almost every way.

Thank you for sharing.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Ereaders age a lot better than other old tech.

I agree! I still use my jetBook Lite from 2009.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Given that this thread is so old, I would doubt anyone has Mobipocket or Mobipocket Creator. We use Calibre or Kindle Gen with KindleUnpack for Calibre to create a Mobipocket eBook.

But I would find most people here don't care about Mobi eBooks.

FWIW: I still have MBP and MBPC running on an old XP box that I have 'round here. :-D

Don't ask me why. Haven't used either in...jeeze, 7-8 years? The last thing I really remember was the issue with Internet Exploder doing some update, that did something, so you had to do a workaround to make MBPC work. LOL.

Hitch