PDF to EPUB
Turn a PDF into an e-book that re-flows to the screen.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
The reason people want this is specific: a PDF on a phone or an e-reader is close to unreadable. The page is a fixed sheet of A4 and the screen is not, so you either zoom and pan or squint at six-point type. EPUB re-flows to whatever width it is given, and that single property is the whole value of the conversion. It also means the original pagination is discarded - the text is rebuilt as a stream of chapters, paragraphs, headings and lists, not as a copy of the printed page.
Use it for anything long that you intend to read rather than consult: a book or manual that only exists as a PDF, a lengthy report you want to get through on a commute, a thesis, a set of papers going onto a Kobo. It is the wrong tool for anything where the layout is the content - a form, a score, a plan.
How it works
- Drop the PDF onto this page. It is checked for a text layer, because there is nothing to re-flow in a scan.
- Choose where the chapters come from: bookmarks, detected headings, or page boundaries as a last resort.
- Fill in the title and author if the document's own metadata is wrong or missing - this is what an e-reader shows in its library.
- Under advanced options set the language if the document is not in the language of this page, and narrow the page range to skip front matter you do not want.
- Press Convert to EPUB, then send the file to your reader however you normally do.
Chapter detection is the feature, not a detail, because an e-book without chapter breaks is one long scroll with no table of contents and no way back to where you were. Bookmarks come first: a document's own outline is its author's statement of where the chapters are, and it beats any heuristic. Heading detection is the fallback, promoting short lines set in larger type. Page boundaries are the last resort - not really chapters at all, but at least somewhere to jump to.
Setting the language matters more than it looks. An EPUB carries a language tag, and readers use it to decide how to hyphenate and how a screen reader pronounces the text. Left on automatic, the tag follows the language of this page rather than the language of your document, which is a sensible default and the wrong answer if you are converting a Spanish book on an English interface.
Title and author are worth a moment even though they are optional. Left empty, they are taken from the PDF's own metadata, which is frequently the name of a template someone used in 2011 or the path of a Word file. That is what appears on your reader's shelf, next to a book with no cover.
Everything runs in your browser: the text extraction through PDF.js, the EPUB packaging through a ZIP writer in a Web Worker. No part of the book is uploaded, which is the honest answer to the question people ask about converters that handle copyrighted material.
What this tool cannot do
- Pagination is discarded by design. Page numbers, running heads, footers and footnote positioning do not survive, because re-flowing text has no fixed pages to attach them to.
- Pictures are not carried across. The EPUB is built from the document's text and structure only, so figures, diagrams and photographs are missing from the result.
- A scan has no text layer and nothing to re-flow, so the conversion stops rather than producing an empty book. Run OCR PDF first.
Questions people ask
- Why convert a PDF to EPUB at all?
- Because a PDF has a fixed page size and an e-reader does not. On a six-inch screen an A4 page is either too small to read or too wide to fit, so you spend the book zooming and panning. EPUB re-flows the text and lets the device set the type size, which is what makes a long document readable on a phone.
- How are the chapters worked out?
- From the document's bookmark outline where it has one, because that is the author's own statement of its structure. Without an outline, headings are detected from type size and used instead. If neither is available, choosing page boundaries splits at each page - not real chapters, but it gives the reader's navigation something to work with.
- Do the illustrations come across?
- Not in the current build. The EPUB is written from the extracted text and its structure, so figures, charts and photographs are left behind. For an illustrated book that is a real loss, and PDF to HTML in page pictures mode is the better route if the images matter more than the re-flowing does.
- Will this work on a Kindle?
- Yes, by way of Send to Kindle, which accepts EPUB and converts it to Amazon's own format on arrival. Copying the file directly into the device's documents folder over USB does not work, because a Kindle does not read EPUB natively. Kobo, PocketBook, Apple Books and most Android readers open it as it is.
- Is the book uploaded to convert it?
- No. Text extraction and EPUB packaging both happen in your browser, so nothing about the document is transmitted - worth saying here, since the files people convert are often books they own and would rather not hand to a third party. The one request a run makes asks whether you have tasks left, and carries a tool name and a hash of the bytes.