[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by NicolaNY

Is there any additional functionality from Mobi2Mobi?

It doesn't take forever to load on my mini Mac?

Actually, I think there is, since it's specifically targeted at manipulating Mobi metadata and Calibre seems to have fairly generic standard fields for stuff. But most of it will be for things you'll likely never use.

Originally Posted by NicolaNY

Going from html/css=>epub=>mobi is an additional step with potential additional distrortion in code etc. By cutting Sigil out i can do html/css=>Mobi . . . i'm guessing its cleaner, but i could be wrong.

I don't use Sigil either. It's just simpler for me to handle all the markup directly or via helper scripts and assemble/arrange files by hand. But unless you're doing some really weird stuff, there's not going to be any distortion in the code.

The simple level of HTML that Mobi uses will work just fine within an ePub package, although the same may not be true in reverse, because ePubs allow for much more complex display and greater formatting niceties.

But as long as you keep your code clean and stick to that common denominator in your formatting, you'll have books that work very well as both as assembled ePub and generated Mobi.

Originally Posted by NicolaNY

I've read great things about kindlegen and Kindlestrip.

Actually, KindleGen is really, really buggy. But it's Amazon's officially supplied tool for a format that's not open or well-documented at all and the Calibre and Mobi2Mobi people had to reverse-engineer to get their own conversions working.

So there's a possibility that a Calibre or other conversion will be missing some small significant thing which will cause problems when being processed by Amazon or displaying on a Kindle.

Originally Posted by NicolaNY

Kindlestrip is super nifty, but my books will only be text plus one image for cover.

Even so, KindleGen will put in a redundant backup copy of the source files by default, and possibly people might get the wrong impression that your books are longer than they actually are if the file size looks big. But I suppose you can compensate for that by putting some sort of length indicator in the product descrpiton.

Incidentally, if you want to avoid command-line use, there's a nifty AppleScript wrapper that one of our MR members wrote up for KindleGen. I don't use it myself, but it's supposed to be pretty good, and preset to the most useful command-line options.

You can also drag and drop ePub files onto Kindle Previewer which will auto-generate mobi files. But these will be larger (compressed at the -c1 option) and sometimes it chokes on certain code (to be fair, it chokes on the exact same code that KindleGen does, since it seems to be using KG for the conversion anyway).

Anyway, good luck with it all, and if you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to ask.