Amazon.com has quietly
acquired
Mobipocket, the privately-held French vendor of eBook server and client
software for handheld devices. The transaction, which was filed on March
30th, completes the realignment of the eBook industry that began last November
when Adobe announced that it would no longer sell its eBook packaging and
serving software. The groundwork is now laid for Amazon to take over
leadership of the eBook industry from Adobe, as the latter company shifts its
focus to corporate document management.
Mobipocket offers eBook packaging software, including proprietary DRM, that
works with a wide variety of handheld devices, such as PDAs and smartphones.
The company found its initial niche in the technical and reference publishing
market, then expanded to fiction and other trade books. It also offers
eBooks in portable device formats on www.mobipocket.com. It seems likely that
Amazon will shut down the Mobipocket.com site and absorb Mobipocket's offerings
into its gargantuan catalog.
Amazon's leadership of the eBook industry is a natural evolution, given that
it does everything else in the book business electronically. It also
dovetails nicely with Amazon's more recent acquisition of BookSurge.com, a
provider of print-on-demand (POD) services that will enable Amazon to offer less
popular books without having to depend on publishers for inventory.
Both Adobe and Microsoft entered and then effectively abandoned the eBook
market, mainly because publishers have been slow to adopt eBooks and to use
them for anything beyond "shovelware" derived from printed books. Makers
of special-purpose eBook reader devices such as Gemstar and Franklin have also
fared poorly; Gemstar has abandoned the market, while Franklin became a part owner
of Mobipocket in order to diversify itself away from its own eBookMan device.
Apart from Mobipocket, the only eBook technology vendor remaining with any
significant market share is eReader, which also offers eBooks in formats for a
wide variety of portable devices as well as PCs. The Mobipocket transaction will surely
deal a serious blow to the company. We expect Amazon's ownership of
Mobipocket to eventually make it the only significant player in the desultory
eBook market.
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