Although it was only alluded to once by Mobipocket in public, the Mobipocket iPhone application is potentially Amazon’s best weapon for indoctrinating more Kindle customers and pulling the Mobipocket format away from obscurity. So, where is it?

At the IDPF conference in May, 2008, I watched Martin Gorner of Mobipocket state to the audience that they had plans to release the Mobipocket reader for more platforms, including the iPhone, before the end of the year. Mobipocket is tightly leashed by their owners, Amazon, so this was great news for Mobi fans. Mobipocket has never really supported any Apple OS before, and my brain enumerated the possibilities of a Mobi iPhone app. My first thought was that this could be the start of some really wonderful synergy for Amazon’s Kindle, because they’d be foolish not to join forces in a new application. And besides adding Apple support, maybe they planned to really update the Mobipocket Reader software and create a user experience on par with the Kindle’s user-interface or Adobe’s Digital Editions.

Just imagine that you could have a similar Kindle experience on your iPhone, shopping for books wirelessly, using a built-in dictionary, taking notes, etc, and at the end of the session all your book data would be sync’d with your Kindle account and back to your Kindle (through the Kindle’s wireless connection), if you had one. Amazon would sell more books, people might upgrade to Kindle devices for the larger screen real estate, and the Mobi format would really come alive, too, if its DRM was supported. It would just require Mobi and Amazon to allow readers to keep both their Mobi and Kindle purchases in the same library and allow for note/bookmark data in the cloud (on Amazon’s internet servers), so that customers’ libraries could be re-downloaded and synchronized across devices. Add special location aware services (via the iPhone’s GPS), special note export features (for bibliographies and personal footnotes), and then I’d be impressed.

Well, by the end of 2008 this never materialized. In December, Chris Meadows of the blog TeleRead surmised that Amazon put the whole project in the deep freeze so it wouldn’t undermine Kindle sales (“The mysterious case of the missing iPhone Mobipocket reader” and “Is Amazon sitting on the Mobipocket iPhone client after all?“). An anonymous source apparently told Chris that “Mobipocket had its iPhone reader complete and ready to ship as of August—but Amazon.com did not permit them to release it.” That isn’t hard to believe, but I hope there’s more to that story. I’d like to know why. Does Apple have secret ebook plans that Amazon is aware of?

In the meanwhile, other contenders have stepped up to the plate, offering E-Book software for the iPhone that comes close to the full potential, but not without limitations. For readers who take the time learn how to crack the DRM on their purchased E-Book files, BookShelf is an iPhone application that can read Palm .PDB and Mobi .PRC files, as well sync with “Shelf Servers,” which are libraries of content on the internet or on your computer (there are E-Reads’ books at Baen Webscriptions‘ Shelf Server). And, of course, there’s the popular Stanza iPhone application, that is a wireless Fictionwise storefront (with access to your Fictionwise eReader library bookshelf), as well as a terrific E-Book reader for growing ePub format. Yet despite supporting over a dozen other formats, too, eReader’s .PDB is the only DRM that works with Stanza, at the very least because of Fictionwise’s support.

Has Mobipocket lost too much time? It’s hard to tell. E-Book sales are still ramping up across all the major platforms (Sony, Kindle, eReader). Our expectations are that iPhone readers are adding to sales, not cannibalizing from other devices. The iPhone has something that the Kindle and Mobipocket should be envious of: popular mindshare with 18-35 year-olds. Every day Mobipocket or Amazon isn’t a part of that zeitgeist, it sets them as outsiders and it counts as lost revenue in the current quarter. Maybe Amazon is gambling that when they do enter Apple’s market, it will make up for all their time hemming and hawing. Maybe they just don’t see the money there, yet (but I doubt this). However, no one has delivered the perfect E-Book reader application for the iPhone yet, either. Let alone for Google’s Android or the new Palm Pre. It’s still Amazon and Mobipocket’s game to win or lose. At the very least, they can sell some ebooks. They just have to show up.

- Michael Gaudet