Mobipocket to Turn Off Its Website and Servers on 31 October
The Mobipocket homepage has recently been updated with a new notice:
The Mobipocket website & its services will be permanently shut down on Oct 31st, 2016. Prior to that date, please ensure:
- You have downloaded copies of all the ebook content you've purchased through Mobipocket. Please re-download any ebooks you need prior to October 31st.
- You have activated all your Mobipocket CDROMs. You can activate CDROMs by clicking here.
Given that Mobipocket has not sold ebooks in nearly five years, nor updated its apps since 2008, I seriously doubt that this will affect anyone.
Anyone who valued the DRMed ebooks they bought in Mobipocket format has already stripped the DRM and converted to another format. (And of course DRM-free Mobi ebooks are technically identical to Kindle ebooks, so they can be easily loaded on to Kindle apps and hardware.)
Me, I haven't bought a DRMed Mobi ebook since I don't know when, but when I did I mainly bought from Fictionwise (which was shut down in late 2012).
But I did used to buy a lot of Mobipocket ebooks. Mobipocket (along with Microsoft's MSReader, Adobe PDF, and eReader) used to be one of the major ebook formats.
As late as 2009 and 2010 it was still sometimes worth buying either MSReader or Mobipocket ebooks and stripping the DRM; sometimes the older format cost less than the Kindle or Epub versions, or sometimes a title might be available in only the older formats (no, seriously, that was still happening in 2010).
But that stopped being true a long time ago.
image by banger1977
They were still around?
Seriously?
That’s more or less what i was thinking.
Man, I remember when I called and talked to that French guy who ran the company about the iOS app it had intended to bring out and was then quashed by Amazon, and got a whole bunch of “No comment”s. Good times, man, good times.
You should send him an email and see if he wants to talk now (off the record of course). I think he’s working for Google now.