Phones and tablets have gradually become one of best pocket books; allowing to store hundreds of literary or scientific works to consult at any time and in any place. Due to the rise of mobile devices in society, several formats have been developed for the distribution of electronic books.
Mobi is one of the formats that has gained the most space in the sector, keeping all the benefits of an electronic book that you can take everywhere. While we can't always read all formats with the factory apps that come with most Android devices, in the Play Store there is a wide variety of readers for this type of files.
In this article we will see the main apps to open mobi files on Android, complying in terms of lightness, safety and functionality. Most of these applications have a free version and a paid version to remove ads, donate or receive other benefits as a user.
What are mobi files?
It is one of the first formats for electronic books that began to be distributed together with specialized hardware for reading them. This file type is still very popular, and can be found in Amazon's libraries for Kindle devices (their official e-book reading hardware).
Today this format has a lot of competition, but among its main features is copyright protection, preventing illegal copies of mobi files that have already been signed from being distributed.
Advantages and disadvantages of mobi files
Being one of the first formats, mobi files have advantages and disadvantages compared to other formats such as epub, pdf or iba.
Among the advantages of mobi are the following:
- Due to its age and reliability, it is one of the formats with the largest market share.
- It can be read from most e-book reader devices (such as Amazon Kindle).
- The fonts that are often used for these files are more detailed and readable than in other formats.
- It adds mechanisms to protect copyright and prevent illegal copies of this type of file.
Since mobi is not the perfect format, its disadvantages include the following:
- Its version of MOBI 7 does not support the use of rich typesetting formats found on recent Kindle devices.
- In some cases, when e-books that are on the MOBI 8 version are synced to a Kindle device (using the email method), the books will no longer display the cover in the Kindle library.
How to open mobi files on Android
This is something very simple that we can do from a wide variety of applications available in the Play Store. Below is a list with the best apps to read, based on platform reviews or downloads; all of them will recognize the mobi file extension and will be able to play it.
ReadEra – Book Reader
This app has the humble sum of 10 million installs and almost a million positive reviews that practically put it as the best reader that stays in the play store.
Like all readers of this type, the app has an optimized library for categorizing and searching your local files. From it you can easily manage books and documents, performing actions such as: copy, change the name, delete duplicate files, search for a book by typing its name or view information about it by accessing the file's metadata.
For more security, the application allows some folders not to be “scanned” when it starts scanning the device for mobi, epub, pdf, etc. files.
As a side note, each folder has a counter for the books it stores. That was a summary of the main features of the app.
Kindle
This is the official Kindle app, developed by Amazon for devices with the same name and any other Android system. In addition to serving as reader for mobi files, this application can be linked with the Amazon library to download books that you have purchased on the platform (if you have a subscription you can download them for free).
It is not the best app for reading e-books, but it has gained a lot of market share and has one of the the world's largest online libraries thanks to Amazon.
eBoox: epub book reader
Do not confuse the name: this application also allows open mobi files on android. This is another well-known application that is continually renewed to improve.
The interface is very friendly for any type of user, among the advantages of this application, it stands out that does not include advertising, load times for files are close to zero, and the overall experience is smooth, just what you need in an eBook reader.
