Editing mobi formatted e-books

[cuber3]

Hey everyone.
I'm fairly new to the whole e-books scene, having gotten my Kindle only a few days ago, and having used Calibre for e-book management.
I find that a lot of my favorite books are in pdf format.
Calibre does a really good job converting most of them, but is there a way to really edit them the way you want?
For instance, some pdf's have some standard MS Word cover image instead of the real book cover, sometimes there are images with captions underneath them where the images are left out and the captions aren't, all while adding half a page of white space, and other sorts of minor glitches.
I don't really mind this all that much since pretty much all my books are more than readable, it's just that it'd be cool to be able to edit my converted mobi books to my exact liking (even if it'd take loads of time to manually do so).

Google search doesn't really come up with anything useful, so I thought I'd ask here

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by cuber3

Google search doesn't really come up with anything useful, so I thought I'd ask here

Calibre converts internally to an HTML format. If you convert to that explicitly you can then edit the HTML, and then convert it to Mobipocket. Set cover and metadata in calibre before conversion, and it will be included in the Mobipocket books.

[DMSmillie]

It isn't possible to edit a MOBI file directly - changes have to be made before converting to MOBI format. As well as pdurrant's suggestion, another option would be to use Calibre to convert the PDF to EPUB format, then use Sigil to edit the EPUB file, adding a cover image and tidying up the formatting, then use Calibre to convert the revised EPUB file to MOBI format.

[cuber3]

Thanks, that'll get me on my way

[mr ploppy]

If you have Python, there is a script called MobiUnpack that will extract html and image files from a mobi ebook. When you've finished editing them you turn them back into a mobi file with mobicreator.

[Paulinafrica]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

It isn't possible to edit a MOBI file directly - changes have to be made before converting to MOBI format. As well as pdurrant's suggestion, another option would be to use Calibre to convert the PDF to EPUB format, then use Sigil to edit the EPUB file, adding a cover image and tidying up the formatting, then use Calibre to convert the revised EPUB file to MOBI format.

This is the method that I use and in general it works pretty well, there are of course other ways of doing it, but this is probably the easiest and the end product is certainly quite acceptable.
Cheers
Paul