HOWTO convert documents to Kindle / mobi format

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I have an HTML file (XHTML 1.1 strict, if you want to be technical about it) that I am trying to make into a Kindle format (.mobi) book.

I've been trying to use calibre and have found the process to be very confusing.

  1. Are there other options besides calibre? (If so, what are they?)

  2. For people who have made Kindle/mobi documents, what have you used as your 'source' materials? Plain text? (X)HTML? Markdown? Word/Pages/Scrivener/etc?

  3. If you have used calibre, how did you figure out which options you needed to use and which to just leave along? There's a metric buttload of them.

ps – yes, it would be nice if Kindle would just accept ePub files, wouldn't it?

Best Answer

I didn't enjoy Calibre. But then I realised that it comes with a bunch of command line utilities, and that made things easier for me.

Imagine you have a bunch of epub files.

for f in *.epub
do
  anytomobi --dest-profile=Kindle "$files"
done

That's the Linux command line to convert them all to mobi using the calibre tool. Except I think the command line toold have changed name in the newest release.

Here's a website, from the Calibre pages, that claims to by a guide to converting HTML to e-book formats, including mobi.

http://amalthia.mediawood.net/tutorials/ebooks/index.html

This page seems most important for your question, it has nice screen shots for the settings used.

http://amalthia.mediawood.net/tutorials/ebooks/steps.html

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