Gozak: MOBI -> AZK Converter

[mattmc]

Preamble:

I've been doing some exploration of the AZK format, which is Amazon's midway point between MOBI and KCR for iOS. Said adventures are detailed in another thread, but I wanted to share a tool I concocted in the course of the journey.

The normal way to convert a MOBI to AZK is to use Kindle Previewer, asking it to show your book for iOS, at which point it spits out an AZK file which you need to go load onto your iDevice. However, I had quite a bit of trouble getting Previewer to work on my Mac, due to various problems, including what version of Java I was running. I did eventually get Previewer working, but in the meantime I worked out my own solution for converting MOBI to AZK.

Gozak:

In the Previewer application, there is an embedded executable that does the conversion from MOBI to AZK. It is called "azkcreator". Gozak is a simple command-line utility that wraps azkcreator. You run Gozak, with the location of your MOBI file, and you get an AZK out the other end.

Most of the work is done by azkcreator. Gozak zips up the resultant directory, names it the same as your MOBI but with the AZK extension, and cleans up the temporary files that are left by azkcreator.

Gozak is open-source and available here on Github. I do not distribute azkcreator with Gozak, as I believe that would violate Amazon's Terms of Use of Previewer. You will need to obtain the azkcreator files from Amazon directly; I give instructions of how to do this in Gozak's readme.

Conclusion:

For the majority of people, Kindle Previewer will serve just fine to create AZK files. For anyone who can't get Previewer working on their computer, or who would like to have the MOBI -> AZK process as a utility that they can integrate into an automated workflow, Gozak provides an alternate option.