EPub to Text

What this tool does

This tool pulls the readable text out of an EPUB ebook. Upload your EPUB and it gathers the words from across the book into one block you can read, copy, or save, all in your browser with nothing uploaded.

How to use it

1. Select your EPUB file.
2. Press Extract, and the tool reads through the book.
3. Read or copy the text that appears. Reset clears it for another file.

How it works, and a neat secret

Here is something most people never realise: an EPUB is secretly a ZIP archive. If you renamed an .epub to .zip and opened it, you would find that each chapter inside is a web page, an XHTML file, which is essentially HTML. That is exactly how an ebook reader displays them.

This tool works the same way. It unzips your EPUB, reads each of those chapter pages, and strips away the HTML tags to leave just the words, stitching the chapters together into one continuous block of text. None of it involves a server, so the book stays on your device.

What you get, and the DRM catch

What comes out is the plain text of the book, the words themselves, with chapters separated by blank lines. What does not come out is everything else an EPUB carries: the cover and images, the fonts and styling, and the page layout. That is the right trade when you want the content rather than the presentation.

There is one important catch to know about. This works on EPUBs that are free of DRM, the copy protection many stores wrap around purchased ebooks. DRM encrypts the book's contents, so a protected file will not extract, and you will get nothing useful back. Books you own without DRM, your own exports, public-domain titles, and freely distributed EPUBs, open cleanly. For other document types, the ODT and PPTX extractors do the same job, and PDF to Text handles PDFs.

Questions people ask