Unpacking a Kindle/Mobi file

Converting an ebook of whatever format to a Kindle/mobi file adds a level of abstraction that always leaves me with this gnawing uncertainty: did anything change under there? Is this what I really want? This may be due to general OCD, but I think it started with Microsoft Word's early attempts to guess what I wanted and automatically change my text for me, causing all manner of consternation and mistrust, as its guesses were often incorrect. Course it doesn't help that Kindle devices don't all display an ebook the same way.

As you might've guessed, I don't trust Kindle Previewer (or the KindleGen that it invokes) either... who knows what it does during conversion!? Indeed, when a feature in an ebook I'm creating doesn't come out right, knowing exactly what KindleGen is doing with my files can be very helpful for cross-platform development.

Thankfully, there are a bunch of folks over at MobileRead who have developed an open source tool for unpacking Mobi files and looking at their innards. It's called Mobi Unpack and the latest version (047) can be found there.

But what do you do with it once you've found it? Double-clicking didn't work at first for me:



And I had no idea what application I should associate it with. I used a rather convoluted system starting with Terminal, navigating to the MU folder, then typing python Mobi_Unpack_v047.pyw, which works, but it seemed like there should be a better way.

One of the Mobi Unpack developers told me I needed a thing called Python Launcher. You can find it in /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/versions/2.5/Resources. It comes with your Mac. Who knew? :)

I dragged Mobi_Unpack_v047.pyw on top of the Python Launcher, and now it's permanently associated: when I double-click, it opens right up.



Once Mobi Unpack is open, use the top field and Browse button to choose the Mobi file that you want to unpack. Use the second field and Browse button to choose the folder you want to unpack the Mobi file into.

I don't check any of the other options.

Then click Start to unpack your Mobi file.

Mobi Unpack creates a mobi8 folder, which presumably is the KF8 version as well as a mobi7 folder which presumably is what old Kindles get. You can explore the files inside (XHTML, CSS, content.opf, etc.) to see how KindleGen (via Kindle Previewer or whatever) is creating your Mobi file.



The mobi8 folder even contains an EPUB file. I thought this might be useful if you were starting with a Mobi file and wanted to convert to EPUB, but unfortunately, at least in my testing (in which I did not generate the Mobi file from an EPUB file), the EPUB did not validate.