PDF to EPUB converter
Drop in a PDF and get back a proper reflowable EPUB with chapters, a table of contents and a cover. It runs in this browser tab, so the file never gets uploaded anywhere.
Read in this tab. Never uploaded. Here's why that's true.
This looks like a scan.
We found page images but no selectable text. Convert it and you'll get a book with nothing in it. Run it through OCR software first. We don't do OCR here.
These become the title and author in your library, which is what your device sorts by. Worth thirty seconds.
Working…
This runs on your machine, so the speed is down to your machine. Keep the tab open.
Your EPUB is ready
Getting it onto your e-reader
Kindle, pick any one
- USB. Plug the Kindle in and copy the file into the documents folder. No account, no internet, and the book never goes near Amazon. It does stay on that one device though.
- Send to Kindle. Drop it into the uploader. Easiest, and it syncs everywhere, but Amazon gets a copy.
- Email. Send it to your @kindle.com address from an approved sender. Same trade as above.
Kobo, Nook, PocketBook
Plug the device in over USB and copy the file across. EPUB is their native format, so there's no conversion step at all.
Routes 2 and 3 send the file to Amazon, who convert it on arrival and keep it in your library. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, since it is what gets you syncing across devices. It is just worth choosing on purpose.
Something went wrong
- EPUB 3
- with NCX fallback
- 0
- bytes uploaded
- Free
- no account, no cap
Why EPUB rather than anything else
EPUB is the one ebook format nearly everything reads. Kobo, Nook, PocketBook and Apple Books open it directly. Amazon's Send to Kindle takes it and converts it on their end. If you're only going to make one file, make this one.
It's also the only format worth building in a browser. AZW3 and MOBI are Amazon container formats with no usable open-source writer in JavaScript, so any site offering them is running Calibre on a server, which means your document gets uploaded. That's the trade we didn't want to make.
What you actually get
The EPUB this produces contains:
- Reflowable text, so font size and screen size stop mattering.
- Chapters, taken from the PDF's bookmarks or worked out from its headings.
- A table of contents written twice, in the EPUB 3 navigation format and the older NCX one, because Amazon's ingester still reads the old one.
- A cover, rendered from page one, so the book gets a thumbnail.
- Images lifted out of the page and placed back in the flow.
- Title and author metadata, which you can correct before converting.
What it strips out
Running heads, running feet and page numbers all get removed. They make sense on a fixed page and are pure noise in a reflowable book, where they'd interrupt you every few screens. Words hyphenated across a line break get stitched back together, so you don't end up reading about something "inter- national".
Where it struggles
Scanned PDFs are the big one: a scan is photographs of pages, so there's no text to extract and you'd need OCR first. Beyond that, anything where the layout carries the meaning will suffer, because a reflowable format has no fixed page to preserve it in. Magazines, wide tables, mathematics and sheet music all fall into that group.
How it works goes through the whole pipeline and is honest about the rest of the failure modes.
Converting for a specific device
- PDF to Kindle, including the Send to Kindle step people miss.
- PDF to Kobo, which reads EPUB natively over USB.
Questions
Is this PDF to EPUB converter really free?
Yes, and there's no catch to look for. There's no account, no watermark, no page cap and no paid tier. It costs us nothing to run because the conversion happens on your computer, not on a server we'd have to pay for.
Does the EPUB work in Apple Books and Google Play Books?
Yes. The output is standard EPUB 3 with an NCX table of contents for older readers, so Apple Books, Google Play Books, Calibre, Thorium and every e-reader made in the last decade will open it.
What happens to images and tables?
Images get pulled out and placed roughly where they sat on the page. Tables are the weak spot: EPUB has no fixed page, so a wide table gets flattened into a long column and often reads badly.
Will the EPUB have chapters?
If the PDF has bookmarks, those become your chapters exactly. If it doesn't, we work them out from heading sizes, which is usually close but not always right. Either way you get a table of contents your reader can navigate.
Is there a page or file size limit?
No page limit. Files up to about 300 MB, which is a practical ceiling rather than a rule: the document is held in your browser tab while it converts, and a bigger one can run the tab out of memory.