Amazon chose MOBL because it was compatible with the PRC format the old Palm Pilots used. The Palm Pilot was the original eBook reader.
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I actually read a bunch of novels on the palm. It seems bonkers to imagine straining my eyes that way these days. But I found it pretty enjoyable at the time.
> It seems bonkers to imagine straining my eyes that way these days. But I found it pretty enjoyable at the time.
Haha yeah! Similar story here. When I was in high school I had a Sony Ericsson W810i.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_W810
I read multiple full books, hundreds of pages long, on this tiny screen.
The Palm was certainly my first ereader. I didn't use it for very long before my sister sent me her Kindle 1 (which she was replacing with a Kindle 2), but my eyes were much better in those days than they are now!
I still miss the auto-scrolling feature of the Palm's ereading software.
Worked fine if you enlarged the font. You ended up with 1/4 or lesss of a page on screen at one time, but who cared. Weeks worth of reading in your pocket!
yup, and the original app to read these was MobiPocket reader. Curiously, the pdb wrapper is completely pointless on all non-palmOS platforms, but since it only adds a negligibly-small header (0x4e + (dataSize / 0xff00) * 8) bytes, nobody cared and it allowed using all original tools
No it wasn't. The original eBook reader was the Rocket eBook reader. The books were html 3.3 files.
The Palm Pilot 1000 was launched in 1996, the Rocket, 2 years later in 1998.
I can remember reading Project Gutenberg books on a Psion Series 3[1] in the early 90s but not sure exactly when that was, '92 maybe.
I'll bet someone must have tried something similar, earlier, using one of the little Tandy portables.
That took me back on a trip down memory lane...
My father had a psion, can't remember the specific model, though most likely from the 3 series, because he was using Palm devices by the time of the 5 Series launch.
The form factor was of the Psion great and I even ended up getting the Sony Clié NX73V more or less because of that years later... Aside from the 227g weight, it was an amazing device for ebooks with an amazing 320x480 resolution...
It's funny, I use a 6" e-ink Tolino (Shine 2HD, if I recall right) for ebooks these days, but the far lower resolution LCD displays never bothered me back then... My phone today has a considerably better and larger display (Samsung AMOLED) compared to then, and yet I would prefer not to read on that; I wonder why...
There was the Sony Data Discman in '92, which failed because books had to be distributed on a proprietary disc format, and there were not many.
The original ebook reader was a microfilm machine.
Uhh…the Rocket didn’t come out until 1998.
Sony’s 1992 Data Discman would beat that by 6 years.
I still miss Peanut Reader and peanutpress.com
Simpler times.