Which tools are most effective for identifying the format of ebook (mobi, epub) files?

Which tools are you using for identification of epub or mobi formats?

For my private library I save every book I've bought (either epub or mobi), removing drm. I would keep also detailed metadata about these files.

Fido, the tool I prefer, has some issues. Either jhove or fits are recognizing these files as bitstreams only. The only working tool seems to be epubcheck, but only for epub files.

raffaele messuti

• file-formats
• jhove
• fits
• fido
• file-format-id

Comments

• mopennock: Are you asking about tools for identification or preferred formats for preservation? Please refine your question and try to avoid chatty, open ended queries (i.e. which tools are you using for...). Tnx.
• Paul Wheatley: Agree with Mo. This has the core of a very useful question for this community, but it needs tightening up a little, and needs a really meaningful and pithy question title
• Andy Jackson: I recommend leaving this ad the identification question and moving the rest into other questions. I responded to the ID part below.

Answer by Andy Jackson

During last year's file format ID hack, the British Library team came up with some Apache Tika signatures for some eBook formats (you can find them in this magic file). Although set up on Tika, these should be easy to port to Fido.

Comments

Answer by Christian Pietsch

I tend to use the command line. All modern computers except for those running Windows have the file tool which can be used like this:

$ file *.epub *.mobi
Natural Language Processing with Python - Steven Bird.epub: EPUB ebook data
pg8086.mobi:                                                Mobipocket E-book "Down_and_Out-_Magic_Kingdom"

Here, I used file to identify the format of all files that have the .epub or .mobi file extension, but I could have used the asterisk alone to identify all non-hidden files in the current directory. So in this little experiment, file successfully identified the two e-book formats, and for the mobi(pocket) format, it was able to extract the title (or a short form of it).

Comments