A script for getting cover images from mobi ebooks
As part of a recent project, I’ve been writing code to get thumbnails for a bunch of different file formats. Most of them have been pretty easy – images and PDFs are both common and simple.
One format I’d been struggling with for a while is the .mobi ebook format – I couldn’t find any good libraries for parsing it, and Google found several people who’d asked about doing it, but without any answers. There’s enough information that I might be able to write my own parser, but it’s more effort than I want to spend.
This morning, I finally found the bits I needed. Several other people have written code that gets the cover image out of the file, and I wrapped that in a script that saves that image as a standalone file:
$ python get_mobi_cover.py pg59664-images.mobi
cover-41bFd.jpeg
If you’re interested, all the code is on GitHub.