ToolJutsu
All tools
PDF Tools

PDF to EPUB

Convert a PDF into a readable EPUB ebook.

Headings detected in the PDF become chapter breaks. Paragraphs reflow to the reader's screen — ideal for phone reading.
Processed on your device. We never see your files.

How to use PDF to EPUB

What is a PDF?

A PDF (Portable Document Format) is a fixed-layout document file. Every page in a PDF has a defined width, height, page number and absolute position for every character and image. That fixed layout is the format’s superpower for printing and signing — what you see is exactly what the recipient sees — but it is also the reason a 6-inch-wide PDF column looks tiny on a phone and unreadable on a 6-inch e-reader.

What is an EPUB?

EPUB (Electronic Publication) is the open standard for reflowable e-books, maintained by the W3C. An EPUB file is a ZIP archive of HTML, CSS, images and a manifest. Because the content is HTML rather than a fixed layout, e-reader software can re-flow it to fit any screen size, let the reader pick a comfortable font and font size, switch to dark mode, and remember where they stopped reading. EPUB 3 is the current version and is supported by Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, the modern Kindle, Calibre, and essentially every dedicated e-reader.

Why convert PDF to EPUB?

The biggest reason is reading on a small screen. A two-column academic PDF is genuinely painful to read on a phone or a 6-inch e-reader because you have to pinch-zoom and pan around each page. Convert it to EPUB and the text reflows to fit the screen at your chosen font size, line spacing and margins.

The second reason is accessibility. Reflowable text plays much better with screen readers, text-to-speech tools, dyslexia-friendly fonts and high-contrast colour modes than a fixed PDF. Converting a research paper, a textbook or a long article to EPUB makes it accessible in ways the PDF never will be.

The third reason is annotation and sync. Modern e-readers and reading apps treat EPUBs as first-class content: you can highlight, bookmark, sync across devices and export your notes. PDFs in those same apps are second-class, often locked to a single device.

How to use this PDF to EPUB converter

  1. Drop your PDF onto the dropzone, or click to browse. The file is opened locally by pdf.js — no upload happens.
  2. Optionally edit the book title and author fields. These go into the EPUB’s metadata and show up in the e-reader’s library.
  3. Click Convert. The converter walks every page, extracts text runs, recognises heading styles, groups paragraphs and writes each detected chapter into a separate HTML file inside the EPUB.
  4. JSZip packs the HTML files, metadata, table of contents and EPUB manifest into the final .epub archive, which downloads automatically.

Quality tips for PDF to EPUB

This converter shines on text-first PDFs: novels, long-form articles, research papers, theses, ebooks-exported-as-PDF and most business documents. The cleaner the source PDF’s heading structure, the cleaner the resulting EPUB chapter list will be.

It works less well on layout-heavy PDFs: magazines, brochures, slide decks, anything with multi-column flowing text wrapped around images. EPUB is a fundamentally different format — single-column, reflowable — so trying to preserve a magazine layout in EPUB is fighting the format. Convert these only when you are willing to lose the layout in exchange for readable reflowing text.

For scanned books, run OCR first (see the FAQ). For Kindle, see the Kindle FAQ — short version, send the .epub to your @kindle.com address.

Privacy

Your PDF stays in your browser. pdf.js reads it locally, the text-extraction and chapter-detection pass runs in JavaScript on your device, and JSZip assembles the EPUB in memory. There is no server round-trip, no temporary file storage and no logging. The pdf.js and JSZip libraries are loaded once from this site and cached, so after the page is open you can switch off Wi-Fi and the conversion still works — verify it in your browser’s Network panel.

E-reader compatibility

The output is a valid EPUB 3 file with a standard META-INF/container.xml, content.opf manifest, an XHTML chapter for every detected section and an NCX/nav-doc table of contents. That means it opens in Apple Books, Kobo (every model), PocketBook, Boox, Nook, Calibre, Thorium Reader, Google Play Books, Apple Books on macOS and iOS, and any browser-based EPUB reader. For Kindle, send through Send-to-Kindle or convert via Calibre as described in the FAQ.

Frequently asked questions

How accurately does the converter detect chapter breaks?
Chapter detection works by inspecting the heading levels pdf.js reports for each text run — paragraphs that the PDF tagged as Heading 1 become EPUB chapter starts, Heading 2s become sub-sections within a chapter. Accuracy depends entirely on whether the source PDF was structured. PDFs exported from Word, Google Docs, LaTeX, Pages or InDesign with proper heading styles typically chapter up cleanly. PDFs made by scanning, by 'Print to PDF' from a plain text editor, or by tools that flatten all text into one style, will produce a single-chapter EPUB because there is no structural information to detect. You can always re-edit chapter breaks in Calibre or Sigil after export.
Will this work on a scanned PDF?
No. Scanned PDFs are essentially images of pages — the file contains pictures of letters, not actual text characters. pdf.js cannot extract text from images, so the converter will produce an empty or near-empty EPUB. To convert a scanned book you first need OCR (optical character recognition) to recognise the letters in each image and write them back into the PDF as real text. ToolJutsu does not currently ship an in-browser OCR tool — Tesseract.js can do it, but it is heavy. For now, run scanned PDFs through ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat's built-in OCR, or a free tool like OCRmyPDF first, then return here.
Are images preserved in the EPUB?
Image handling is limited. The converter focuses on text and structure: it extracts the textual flow, headings and paragraph order, and writes those into the EPUB. Embedded raster images can be carried across, but their position is approximate — EPUB is a reflowable format, so the concept of 'this image goes here on page 47' does not translate. If your PDF is image-heavy (a photo book, a comic, a heavily illustrated technical manual), EPUB is the wrong target format; consider keeping it as PDF or converting to CBZ for comics. For text-first books with occasional figures, the converter does a reasonable job.
Will the EPUB work on a Kindle?
Modern Kindles (post-2022) accept EPUB through the Send to Kindle service or by emailing the file to your @kindle.com address — Amazon converts the EPUB to KFX on receipt. Older Kindles still need MOBI or AZW3, neither of which this tool produces. The easiest route is to download the EPUB from here, then drop it onto Calibre and use its built-in 'Convert books' feature to produce a Kindle-compatible KEPUB/MOBI. Kobo, PocketBook, Boox, Nook, Apple Books and Google Play Books all open EPUB natively with no conversion step.
Where does the PDF go during conversion?
Nowhere outside your browser tab. pdf.js opens the PDF locally and extracts the text on your device; the converter then builds the EPUB structure (chapters, table of contents, container.xml, content.opf) entirely in JavaScript and asks JSZip to pack it into the .epub file in memory. The download is served from that in-memory blob. No uploads, no server-side processing, no logging of file contents or metadata. After the page has loaded the conversion works offline.

Related tools

EPUB to PDF

Convert EPUB ebooks into PDFs you can print.

PDF to Word

Convert PDFs into editable DOCX Word documents.

PDF to HTML

Convert a PDF into basic HTML.

PDF to TXT

Extract a PDF's text and download it as a .txt file.

PDF Text Extractor

Pull the plain text content out of a PDF.

Word to PDF

Convert DOCX Word documents into PDFs.