Convert MOBI to EPUB
MOBI exists because Amazon bought the company that made it and built a reading empire on top. EPUB exists because everyone else standardized. This conversion is what you run when a book is in the first world and your reading happens in the second.
Use this without the search next time. Prathom Workbench puts Prathom's tools in your toolbar.
Add to Chrome — freeDrop your MOBI file here, or click to browse
Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- Opens on Kobo, Nook, Apple Books, Google Play Books and phone readers
- Chapters and table of contents rebuilt as real navigation
- Text re-flows properly on small screens
- No watermark and no sign-up
How to use MOBI to EPUB
- 1
Add the MOBI
A book downloaded from a public-domain archive, bought DRM-free, or exported from your own library. Files still under Amazon's encryption cannot be converted.
- 2
Convert
A complete e-book toolchain unpacks the book on our server and rebuilds it as EPUB. Long books take a little time.
- 3
Load it into your reader
Copy it over USB, or drop it into whichever library app you use. Most readers will index it and pick up the title and author automatically.
How it works
The MOBI is a Palm database: a header, a record list, and the book's text and images stored as numbered records inside it. The converter walks that structure, extracts the markup and assets, and assembles a fresh EPUB — a ZIP archive holding XHTML documents, a manifest describing them, and a navigation file listing the reading order.
The two formats are close enough underneath that this is largely a repackaging job. Both store the book as marked-up text and images; they disagree about the wrapper and about how much of HTML the reader is expected to understand.
Why EPUB is worth moving to
Almost everything reads it. Kobo, Nook, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Caliber, and the reading apps on both phone platforms. Even Kindle accepts EPUB through Send to Kindle now, which makes it the only format in this family that is genuinely universal.
It is an open specification. Maintained by a standards body rather than by one retailer, which is the property that matters for a personal library meant to outlast any particular company's decisions.
It handles modern formatting. Real stylesheets, embedded fonts, scalable images. MOBI's ceiling is low enough that publishers stopped targeting it.
Where the conversion is weakest
Complex layout does not appear from nowhere. If the MOBI was built from an old, plainly formatted source — which describes most of them — the EPUB inherits that plainness. Conversion moves a book between containers; it does not typeset it.
Tables and footnotes are the specific things worth checking afterwards. MOBI handles both awkwardly, and books in that format often have them flattened already, so what arrives in the EPUB is whatever compromise the original made.
Images keep their original pixel dimensions, which on older books can mean illustrations sized for a 600-pixel-wide screen looking soft on a modern high-density display. That resolution was lost when the MOBI was built.
Managing a library across both worlds
If you read on more than one device, keeping EPUB as the master copy is the arrangement that causes the least friction. It loads directly on non-Kindle hardware, Send to Kindle accepts it for the Kindle, and converting outward from EPUB when something demands another format is easy.
The reverse arrangement — MOBI as the master — leaves you converting every time you want to read anywhere else, and each pass through an older format is a chance to lose structure that the newer one could have carried.
Examples
A classic from a public-domain archive
Smaller, because EPUB is a ZIP of compressed HTML while MOBI carries index structures alongside the text. The chapter list becomes a proper navigation document, so the reader's contents menu works rather than showing one undivided block.
A book with an embedded table of contents only
The clickable page inside the book survives as a page. What the reader's own menu shows depends on structure that this file never had — the conversion cannot invent chapter divisions the source did not mark, only carry across what is there.
Frequently asked questions
Why can my Kobo not read a MOBI already?
Because MOBI is effectively Amazon's house format and every other manufacturer standardized on EPUB, which is maintained as an open specification. Kobo, Nook and the major phone reading apps all support EPUB natively and none support MOBI, so the file is not corrupt when a device ignores it — it is simply foreign.
My file has DRM. Can this remove it?
No. Books bought through Amazon carry encryption tied to your account, and this converter reads the file as it finds it. A DRM-protected book either fails outright or produces unreadable output, because what was processed was the encrypted payload rather than the text. Removing DRM is a separate matter and not something this tool does.
Will the formatting look the same?
Broadly, and often better. MOBI's renderer understands a small, dated subset of HTML, so most books in that format are simply formatted anyway. EPUB supports far more, meaning nothing needs to be discarded on the way across — but it cannot add styling that the source never carried, so a plain MOBI becomes a plain EPUB.
What about my reading position and notes?
They do not transfer. Bookmarks, highlights and furthest-page-read are stored by the device or app against a specific book file, not inside the book itself, so the converted copy arrives as a new title starting at page one. Nothing is lost from the original file, which keeps its own history.