Amazon and DRM changes

[slm]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Microsoft's .lit, Sony's BBeB(.lrf), Peanut Press's eReader (.pdb)... and the list goes on. I know it's fun to paint Amazon as the only wrench in the path to a one-open-ebook-format-to-rule-them-all nirvana, but It's not entirely accurate. Everybody was in the proprietary format development game in the beginning. At the time epub became the defacto standard of all non-Amazon ebook stores, it would have made no sense for Amazon to retool in order to adopt a format/DRM scheme it clearly didn't need.

Oddly enough--though no one notices it today--mobi is really an early version of epub--the original Mobi converter produced "OpenEBook" projects (with some additional features). Eventually, OEB evolved into epub2 so OEB is, essentially, epub1. And I guess Mobi would be epub1.x.

[DiapDealer]

It's possible that MobiCreator once allowed content to be saved in a format that was compatible with Open Ebook Project, but I'm unaware of any period of time when a mobi/prc file wasn't a binary database. That mobi could be seen as epub v1.x seems a rather thin stretch of the facts to me.

[slm]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

It's possible that MobiCreator once allowed content to be saved in a format that was compatible with Open Ebook Project, but I'm unaware of any period of time when a mobi/prc file wasn't a binary database. That mobi could be seen as epub v1.x seems a rather thin stretch of the facts to me.

The .prc version of mobi is an artifact of the way the Palm Pilot stored data--palm resources had to be coded for use on the device. (The "text" programs for Palm also produced 'prc' files.

[DiapDealer]

Yes. But inside the Palm resource container, the mobi ebook was still always a binary format. And that binary format was very much non-oeb-like.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

It's possible that MobiCreator once allowed content to be saved in a format that was compatible with Open Ebook Project, but I'm unaware of any period of time when a mobi/prc file wasn't a binary database. That mobi could be seen as epub v1.x seems a rather thin stretch of the facts to me.

I can't envisage any version of mobipocket ebooks being "epub v 1.x" either. I still have a Palm OS PDA with two ereader programs using incompatible .pdb files and one is Mobipocket.

The .pdb stuff was very primitive (=PalmOS Data Base) and the mobi/prc was at best a sort of HTML 3 with a few extra mobi tags which don't exist in epub or azw3.

Oddly enough--though no one notices it today--mobi is really an early version of epub--the original Mobi converter produced "OpenEBook" projects

I suspect you are thinking of some other format. Not anything to do with Mobipocket or Mobicreator.

A quick search suggests that Softbook Press, not Mobipocket, is the ancestor /creator of original Open Book spec which led to epub 2.0

EDIT
It's possible that the MobiPocket Reader app on some platforms could read Open Book spec ebooks from Softbook (who had a real ereader in 1998). Amazon bought Mobipocket in 2005. Apple iPhone and Kindle 1 came out in 2007. Android in 2008. So neither iOS nor Android ever got the Mobipocket Reader App. Amazon released the Kindle Apps for iOS and Android instead, but I don't know when.

EDIT 2.
Calibre was produced initially for the Sony ereader (which was LRF originally and epub2 later). It can produce epub 2.0, epub 3.0, azw3, old mobi, a dual mobi (basically old mobi and azw3 in one file), LRF, two kinds of pdb but not the format for a Softbook, which is essentially epub 1.0, though never called that.

MobiCreator on XP

I have the last ever public MobiCreator and it only does mobi/prc for actual ebooks. It lives on on a VM clone of my 2002 XP laptop.

It can manage Palm databases and do various odd stuff, but not make a SoftBook compatible Open Book.