Best way to convert from Mobi to ePub?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by crashnburn

My mistake to have mentioned it. Maybe we should never share what SOURCE was.

For e.g. a lot of books that I download from gutenberg and open domain stuff ends up being saved in a folder. My cousin is not big on going online and doing this, so I share those on a pen drive with him. For an uncle I pretty much have to put them onto his reader. Not very tech savvy.

How does it matter to people how & where I got the books? The question asked was MOBI to ePUB from all flavors of .mobi files.

Why? Because MARVIN is much much better for reading and highlighting than any .mobi reader that I know about.

I don't care WHY you want to convert MOBI to ePub. Not my business and I don't care. Nor do I want to argue about whether or not you SHOULD be able to mention where the MOBIs originally came from without assumptions being made. I happen to agree that you SHOULD be able to. I only know it's unwise to do so when it has nothing to do with the problem at hand or its solution. Past experience on the forums has taught me that.

I'd much rather discuss whether or not my advice to use the What's My Mobi script has helped in identifying the underlying structures in a collection of MOBIs from various sources or not. But if you feel tangential, philosophical debate about what you SHOULD be able to talk about is the best way to get all your MOBIs in a Marvin-ready ePub state, then far be it for me to stand in your way. I was simply offering a practical tip that my time spent seeking/giving help (of a technical nature) on these forums has taught me. Take it or leave it: but by all means... let's move on and get back to the HOW part of the discussion.

[crashnburn]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I don't care WHY you want to convert MOBI to ePub. Not my business and I don't care. Nor do I want to argue about whether or not you SHOULD be able to mention where the MOBIs originally came from without assumptions being made. I happen to agree that you SHOULD be able to. I only know it's unwise to do so when it has nothing to do with the problem at hand or its solution. Past experience on the forums has taught me that.

I'd much rather discuss whether or not my advice to use the What's My Mobi script has helped in identifying the underlying structures in a collection of MOBIs from various sources or not. But if you feel tangential, philosophical debate about what you SHOULD be able to talk about is the best way to get all your MOBIs in a Marvin-ready ePub state, then far be it for me to stand in your way. I was simply offering a practical tip that my time spent seeking/giving help (of a technical nature) on these forums has taught me. Take it or leave it: but by all means... let's move on and get back to the HOW part of the discussion.

DD - I am glad you are helping. I did not intend to fight with you.

It was and is confusing as all I have are a bunch of .MOBI files that I can open in MobiPocket reader but I'd like to read them in Marvin on iPad.

When people started arguing and debating the sources/ formats/ flavors of .mobi files, I just mentioned I do not know what types they are.

Getting back on topic.

Either way, I'd like to know how should someone do the following:
- Identify the .mobi file type - wrapper and inner matter
- Use the right set of workflow + tools to unwrap/ unbundle and then rebundle into ePub.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by crashnburn

Either way, I'd like to know how should someone do the following:
- Identify the .mobi file type - wrapper and inner matter

If you have Python installed the aforementioned "What's My Mobi" script will tell you exactly what you're dealing with "under the hood" of the oft-confusing file extension. Right now, the script is attached the thread immediately below this one.

- Use the right set of workflow + tools to unwrap/ unbundle and then rebundle into ePub.

In my experience, if the ebook is in the KF8 format (or includes the KF8 format), the best approach is to use KindleUnpack to extract an ePub. Clean up/validate with Sigil/Flight Crew if necessary.

If it's anything else under the hood, I usually use calibre to convert to ePub first and then again, clean up/validate with Sigil/Flight Crew if necessary.

I don't use KindleUnpack for converting older MOBI-only files much anymore, simply because the code extracted from one is really only useful for rebuilding another MOBI-only book (with Kindlegen). It's not suitable for creating epubs (or KF8s for that matter) without some major hands-on (and extensive) reworking of the code (which is basically HTML3.2).

[crashnburn]

Let me say.. you ROCK! before I even try this out. I will try it out and then come back to you with the experience Thank you.

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

When we, nowadays, get a book from the service of Kindle Direct Publishing, we get a .mobi but THAT .mobi has inside a .kf8 and a .mobi7. So we can't call .mobi anymore just the old mobi format; now there are mobis that are -simultaneously- .kf8 and .mobi7.

When I Unpacked the downloaded Kindle book file the other day, my resulting folders were named Mobi 7 and Mobi 8

In another thread, Hitch has described the latter as an "epub-with-a-mobi-wrapper". (I upload Sigil-built epubs to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform.)

Further to this distinction, the Mobi 7 files (htm, opf, and ncx) totaled about one-fourth the size of the Mobi 8 files (basically just the epub). Yet the latter is what Amazon uses to calculate the "download fee" of 15 cents per MB. The difference, on that particular book, is about 35 cents per download, that I am being overcharged for buyers with one of the older e-ink Kindles, sigh.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Further to this distinction, the Mobi 7 files (htm, opf, and ncx) totaled about one-fourth the size of the Mobi 8 files (basically just the epub). Yet the latter is what Amazon uses to calculate the "download fee" of 15 cents per MB. The difference, on that particular book, is about 35 cents per download, that I am being overcharged for buyers with one of the older e-ink Kindles, sigh.

I've never experienced that sort of size discrepancy between the individual MOBI and the KF8 components myself. Often times, I've found the KF8 portion of the kindlebook to be slightly smaller than the MOBI (because MOBI uses a lot more markup where KF8 utilizes CSS that effectively eliminates a lot of repeat code).

You're not comparing the sizes of the folders/files created by KindleUnpack are you? If so, that wouldn't be very relevant to download fees.

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by Mithgalay

... I made sure that calibre will deliver a good result for me when I convert the epubs to mobi.

Use Kindlegen to convert your epubs to mobi. The results will be better than with Calibre.