EPUB to TXT converter

How it works

1. 1

   Drop your EPUBs

   One ebook or up to twenty at once, each up to 50MB: novels, manuals, course books, reports saved as EPUB.

2. 2

   Your browser reads the book

   The EPUB is unzipped on your device and each chapter is read in the order the book lists it. Formatting, images and scripts are dropped; titles and paragraphs are kept.

3. 3

   Copy or download the .txt

   Preview the plain text, copy it to your clipboard, or save a .txt file for each book. Nothing is uploaded or stored.

What is inside an EPUB

An EPUB is a ZIP archive with a small website inside it: one HTML file per chapter (or per part of a chapter), a stylesheet, images, and a package file that lists the chapters in reading order. Opening it in a text editor shows only compressed bytes, which is why you need a converter to get at the words.

This converter reads the package file, walks the chapters in order, and turns each chapter's HTML into plain paragraphs. Character codes such as & and — become the real characters, page-number markers from the print edition are removed, and runs of blank lines are tidied up so the result reads cleanly.

Where EPUB to TXT falls short

Plain text can't hold pictures, so illustrated books, comics and fixed-layout EPUBs made of page images give little or no text. Footnotes stay where the publisher put them, which is often a separate notes chapter at the end. Lists come out as one item per paragraph without bullets. For a typical novel or nonfiction book, the result is the full text in reading order.

Related free tools

For other formats, use PDF to Markdown for PDFs and HTML to Markdown for web pages. The token counter tells you whether the text fits a model's context window, and the text splitter breaks a long book into parts.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert an EPUB to TXT?

Drop the .epub file on this page. In a few seconds you get a plain text preview you can copy, plus a Download .txt button. There is nothing to install and no account, and the conversion happens in your browser tab rather than on a server.

Are the chapters kept in the right order?

Yes. Every EPUB has a reading order (its "spine") that lists the chapter files from first to last, and the converter follows it exactly. Each chapter's title goes on its own line, followed by its paragraphs with a blank line between them, and a blank line separates one chapter from the next.

What happens to images, tables and formatting?

Plain text has no formatting, so bold, italics, fonts and colors are dropped and images are left out. Table cells come out as text in reading order. Line breaks inside poems or addresses are kept, and so is preformatted text such as code. A table of contents built as a navigation menu (the EPUB 3 kind) is skipped, since it only repeats the chapter titles.

Is my EPUB uploaded anywhere?

No. The file is unzipped and converted inside your browser, and the .txt file is created on your device. It is never sent to our servers or anyone else's, so it stays on your device the whole time.

Can it convert books with DRM?

No. DRM-protected EPUBs, such as many store-bought ebooks, have their chapters encrypted, so there is no readable text in the file. The converter tells you when it finds this. DRM-free EPUBs, including most public domain books and ebooks you made yourself, convert normally.

Why convert an EPUB to plain text for ChatGPT or Claude?

A .txt file is the simplest format to paste into a chat or upload as a knowledge file: no markup, no zipped folders, just the words in reading order. A whole book is often long, so check its size with the token counter and split it into parts with the text splitter if it doesn't fit in one go.

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