Mobipocket

» see mobipocket.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The name arrived backwards for most people, as a file extension years before it was a company. You had a.mobi on a disk somewhere and no reason to wonder where the three letters came from. They came from a small firm in Paris, and by the time anybody looked it up the firm had already been inside Amazon for a decade.

Thierry Brethes and Nathalie Ting incorporated Mobipocket SA in March 2000. The product was a reader for the pocket hardware of that moment, which meant Palm OS and Pocket PC first, then Symbian and Psion's EPOC, then Java phones and BlackBerry. Making one book file open on all of them was the actual engineering problem, and the answer was a container of their own built on the Palm document format, with an optional layer of encryption tied to a device identifier.

There was a second piece that reads stranger now than it did then. The Web Companion pulled news down to the desktop overnight and packaged it as a document your handheld could carry, so you left the house with a private newspaper assembled while you slept. In 2001 that was the only sane way to read anything long on a device with no connection of its own.

None of this reached me, and the reason is the hardware rather than the software. A Palm or a Pocket PC in Turkey in the early 2000s was imported, priced in a foreign currency, and sat well above what a student would spend on a thing whose only job was to hold text. Reading long documents happened on a desktop with a modem attached, and it happened in a browser. The whole ebook category here was a category you read about.

~ the dossier ~

~ a container built on palm ~

The format is the part that mattered and it was assembled out of older pieces. Underneath was PalmDOC, the compression scheme Palm devices already used, wrapped in a record structure that carried an index and metadata alongside the images. On top sat the Open eBook markup of the day, which is to say a subset of HTML. The result read like a web page and shipped like a database, and it was small enough to matter when storage came in megabytes.

Two variants existed from early on, one plain and one encrypted. The encrypted one bound a purchased book to a device number you typed in when you registered the reader. That decision is the reason a lot of legally bought Mobipocket libraries are unopenable today: no other reader implements the scheme, and the servers that issued the keys are gone.

~ the format under the kindle ~

Amazon bought the company in April 2005 and said very little about why. The reason showed up two and a half years later, in November 2007, when the first Kindle shipped reading a format called AZW. AZW is the Mobipocket container with Amazon's own lock in place of the original one. Every book sold for a Kindle for the next fifteen years descended from a specification written in Paris for devices with grayscale screens.

That is a strange fate for a startup acquisition. The company was absorbed and the product was retired, while the file format was promoted to the foundation of the largest bookstore ever built. Amazon finally retired the.mobi extension for personal documents in August 2022 in favor of EPUB, which means the thing outlived its own creators as an active standard by more than a decade.

~ two endings, five years apart ~

The commercial death came first and it was announced by email. Publishers were told in late 2011 that mobipocket.com would accept no new titles after 2 December, and that existing titles would stop selling and be pulled on 2 January 2012. The store had by then been competing with its own parent for six years, which is not a competition anybody wins.

The reader software and the site limped on with no updates until 31 October 2016, when Amazon switched off the servers for good. Nothing was announced loudly. The desktop Creator tool that publishers had used to build.mobi files kept circulating on download sites afterward, unsupported, which is the usual afterlife for a piece of software people still need and nobody maintains.

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