Mobipocket is a cross-platform e-book format developed by a French team at the dawn of the e-book revolution.  It was the earliest attempt to make a one-size-fits-all program and for years the most successful.  Then Amazon acquired it and reversed its polarity, turning it from a universal format to an exclusive closed system. That system became the Kindle. E-book publishers wanting to convert files for the Kindle use a variant of Mobi called eBookBase.

According to Diesel founders Scott Redford and Kelley Allen. you can kiss your eBookBase goodbye. “Last month,” they report on the Diesel website, ” eBookBase informed their client base that they had no current or future intentions of renewing their contracts with the Agency Five (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster) and that they were pulling all A5 books off our site.”

Redford and Allen have looked at some other examples of a fading MobiPocket presence and wonder Are We Witnessing the Slow, Agonizing Death of Mobipocket?

It makes sense to us. A whole new suite of tools has burgeoned since the program was introduced and it just may be that the time has come to deep-six Mobi. Au revoir, cher ami!

Richard Curtis