MOBI conversion provides partial import of Amazon Kindle format books. Text, metadata, and basic formatting carry over, but MOBI’s proprietary features like Amazon’s DRM and Kindle-specific markup are stripped.
How it works
Parse MOBI header. The Palm Database (PDB) header and MOBI header identify the encoding, compression, and metadata.
Extract text. The MOBI text is stored in PalmDoc format with LZ77 compression. The converter decompresses and re-encodes it as UTF-8 HTML.
Parse metadata. Title, author, and language come from the MOBI header and EXTH records.
Split chapters. MOBI chapter positions (from
srcs/srccrecords) divide the text into Honzo CHAP entries.Embed images. MOBI images are extracted from the PDB records and embedded as
IMG_chunks.Build. All chunks are assembled into the final Honzo file with per-chapter LZ4 compression.
Metadata mapping
Maps to Honzo title in META section.
Maps to Honzo creator.
Maps to Honzo language (BCP 47).
Maps to identifiers.isbn.
Maps to Honzo publisher.
Maps to Honzo published.
Preserved features
CHAP chunks via chapter break detection.
IMG_ chunks from PDB image records.
Title, author, language in META section.
Bold and italic preserved as HTML.
- Amazon DRM is not supported. Only DRM-free MOBI files can be converted.
- Kindle Format 8 (KF8) markup is partially preserved; some CSS-based formatting may be lost.
- Margin notes and highlights specific to the Kindle ecosystem are not carried over.
- Embedded fonts from AZW3/KF8 are not extracted.
- Page break data is inferred from MOBI chapter positions.
Example
honzo-cli convert book.mobi book.hzo
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