MOBI to PDF Converter turns a Kindle ebook into a PDF that prints cleanly and opens on any computer, phone or tablet without a Kindle app. Drop in a DRM-free .mobi, .azw3, .azw or .prc file, choose a page size (A4, US Letter, A5 or a 6 by 9 inch book page), a text size and margins, and download the PDF. Both generations of the Kindle format are read: the older MOBI (Mobipocket, KF7) and the newer KF8 used in AZW3 files. The PDF contains real text rather than pictures of pages, so you can select, copy and search it, and the file stays small. The cover becomes the first page, images stay in place, a contents page links to every chapter, and PDF bookmarks follow the book table of contents. The embedded font covers Latin with all European diacritics, Cyrillic and Greek. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so the book is never uploaded. Kindle books bought from Amazon are protected with DRM and cannot be converted by any tool without removing that protection, which this tool does not do. To keep a reflowable ebook instead use MOBI to EPUB Converter, to read the book on screen use MOBI Reader, and for plain text or Word use MOBI to Text & Word.
A MOBI file is a small database rather than a document. It uses the Palm database layout from the early 2000s: a header, a list of records, and the records themselves. The first record holds the book metadata, the next ones hold the text in blocks of 4096 bytes compressed with a simple LZ77 scheme, and after them come the images, one per record. In the older MOBI format the text is a single long HTML document, chapters are separated by page break tags, and links point to byte positions inside the text instead of named anchors. The newer KF8 format, used in AZW3 files, splits the HTML into skeletons and fragments that are reassembled through index tables, and links point to fragment numbers and offsets. Converting either one to PDF means first rebuilding the book: decompressing the text, reassembling the chapters, turning byte position links into real anchors, and matching image records to the pictures they belong to. Only then can the text be laid out on fixed pages. This converter does all of that in your browser, rebuilds the book as clean chapters, and then sets it in the page size you choose with headings, images, a contents page and bookmarks. Because the text stays real text, the PDF remains searchable and accessible, unlike a PDF made from screenshots of a Kindle screen.