EPUB to PDF

If you bought the book, this probably will not work

The first thing to check, and the reason most conversions fail.

Ebooks sold by the major stores carry digital rights management. A DRM-protected file is encrypted — it is not a readable EPUB at all, and no converter can open it, including this one. If you try, you will get an error about an invalid or unreadable file.

That is not a limitation anyone can engineer around. DRM exists precisely to prevent it, and stripping it is against the terms you agreed to and unlawful in many countries.

What does work: a DRM-free EPUB. That covers a great deal — books from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, titles from publishers who sell without DRM, technical books from most developer-focused publishers, an EPUB you exported yourself from a writing tool, a manuscript a colleague sent you, documentation published in EPUB form.

A quick way to tell: if the file opens in any EPUB reader you like rather than only in the one app you bought it from, it is DRM-free.

Chapters come out in the right order

A small thing that goes wrong surprisingly often elsewhere.

An EPUB is a zip archive of HTML files plus an index describing the reading order. The filenames inside are frequently unhelpful — ch1.xhtml, ch10.xhtml, ch2.xhtml — so a converter that simply sorts the files puts chapter ten between one and two, and the resulting PDF is scrambled.

This one reads the book's own spine, which is the ordered list the format uses to say what comes after what. So the chapters appear in the order the author intended, front matter included, however the files happen to be named.

Expect text, not pictures

Being straight about this because it decides whether the result is useful to you.

The chapter text is converted. Images inside the book do not come through. An EPUB stores its pictures as separate files inside the archive and references them by internal paths, and those paths do not resolve once the text has been lifted out — so illustrations, diagrams, photographs and the cover will be missing from the PDF.

Which makes this a good fit for a novel, an essay collection, a report, a manuscript, documentation that is mostly prose. It is the wrong tool for a cookbook, a photography book, a comic, a children's picture book or a textbook where the diagrams carry the argument. For those, use an ebook manager on your own machine that can do a full-fidelity conversion.

Formatting is simplified too. Headings, paragraphs, italics and lists survive; the book's own fonts, drop caps, decorative dividers and careful typographic spacing generally do not.

Understand what you are giving up

Worth a moment's thought, because sometimes the right answer is not to convert at all.

EPUB is reflowable: the text has no fixed page size, so it rearranges itself to whatever screen and font size you are using. PDF is the opposite — a PDF is a fixed layout, a set of pages of a definite size. Converting one to the other throws away the single thing an EPUB is good at.

On a phone, a converted PDF is markedly worse to read than the EPUB was: you are pinching and panning around a page designed for A4 instead of reading text sized for your screen.

So convert when the fixed layout is the point. Printing the book. Annotating it in a PDF reader. Submitting it somewhere that only accepts PDF. Reading on a device or in software with no EPUB support. Keeping a page-numbered copy so that a citation means something.

Do not convert simply to read it on a phone or tablet — install an EPUB reader instead, and the book will be better on every count.

How the save works

The chapters are combined and opened in a new window, where the print dialog appears. Set the destination to Save as PDF and choose where to put it.

Two consequences. Your browser needs to allow popups for this site, or the window cannot open — if nothing happens, that is why. And the page size, margins and any scaling come from that dialog, so adjust them there.

For a long book, the print preview will report a lot of pages, which is a useful check that the whole thing came through rather than one chapter.

Nothing is uploaded

The archive is opened and read on your own device. An ebook library is a reasonably personal thing — what someone reads is not information they necessarily want on a converter's server — and there is no file size limit or daily quota here, because there is no server doing the work.

Related tools

PDF to EPUB goes the other way, which is worth knowing about if what you actually want is a reflowable version of a PDF. Word to PDF handles documents, and TXT to PDF Converter turns plain text into a properly paginated PDF with real selectable text.