If you buy an ebook on amazon and use the kindleunpack mod on it, is there any (and if so what) personal information retained inside the output file? Does it matter if it's originally an AZW3/4 or .mobi file?

Would be nice for someone to answer this, if they know.

[Anonyma'am]

I'm surprised no one answered this. I rarely visit this forum so I just chanced on your question!

This was an interesting experiment. First, I opened an azw3 for editing and looked at the relevant files. I found nothing that would immediately identify who bought/borrowed the book from Amzn. I haven't tried this yet with a library book or archive.org.

Then I extracted it as an epub and discovered something else unrelated to your question. The extracted epub was hugely bloated! Again, I opened it for editing and found that all the stuff left over in the target directory was added to the new epub. Images, text, URLs, etc.. It shocked and embarrassed me because I've used this process before as a courtesy and now I wonder how crap my results really were!

Lesson: delete all files in the target directory after each extraction.

Later: Turns out the actual epub is just fine to read. It's just bloated because of the non-usable pointers/references. Still, delete those files from the target directory.