Book Outline Extractor

The Book Outline Extractor pulls the table of contents and chapter hierarchy out of an EPUB and hands it back as structured text. That is genuinely useful when you need the skeleton of a book without the prose: drafting a study guide or chapter-by-chapter summary, building a reading plan or course syllabus around an assigned text, or sanity-checking that chapters are ordered and named correctly before you submit a manuscript or send it to a reviewer.

Because the output is also available as CSV and JSON, it fits data-prep and tooling workflows too. The CSV (with level, title, and href columns) drops into a spreadsheet or imports as tasks into a project tool, where each chapter becomes a row to track. The JSON keeps the nested parent-child structure intact, so developers and writers building scripts, static sites, or documentation pipelines can consume the outline programmatically rather than retyping it by hand.

The flow is short. Drop or select an EPUB, the tool reads its table of contents in your browser, and you get a live nested preview plus three counts: total TOC entries, top-level chapters, and the book title pulled from metadata. You then pick a format and download, or copy the result. Everything runs locally; nothing is uploaded, and nothing persists once you close the tab.

Outline data is read from the EPUB's own navigation. The extractor first looks for the EPUB 3 nav document (the toc nav), and if that is absent it falls back to the older NCX navMap used by EPUB 2 files. Four export shapes are supported: indented plain TXT, Markdown with heading levels, flat CSV, and nested JSON that preserves the full hierarchy including each entry's href.

What it does not do: it does not convert, edit, or rebuild the EPUB, and it does not extract body text, word counts, or images: it reports the structure the book already declares. Input is EPUB only; PDF, MOBI, and other formats are out of scope.

The outline is only as good as the book's own table of contents. With no nav.xhtml or toc.ncx, or an empty one, the tool says no table of contents was found; it does not rebuild an outline from headings, even where an e-reader builds its own.

DRM-protected EPUBs cannot be read at all; the tool detects encryption and stops rather than returning a partial result. Quality issues in the source carry straight through too: if chapter titles in the nav are generic (Chapter 1, Untitled, or a filename), that is exactly what you will get back, because the extractor reports labels rather than inventing better ones.

A common mistake is judging completeness by the on-screen preview alone. The counts reflect the declared TOC depth, which may be shallower or deeper than the book's real chapter structure: some publishers list only part-level entries, others nest every subheading.

Open the downloaded file and compare it against the book itself. Confirm the chapter count and order match the actual reading sequence, that nesting depth looks right (top-level chapters versus subsections), and that titles are real names rather than placeholders or filenames. If you exported CSV or JSON, spot-check that the level values and href links line up with the entries you expect, since those drive any spreadsheet or script that consumes them.

Watch for front and back matter; cover, copyright, acknowledgments, and index pages often appear as TOC entries and may need trimming depending on your purpose. If the title field shows a dash or the wrong name, the EPUB metadata is the cause, not the outline parsing.

For a syllabus of record or a citation, check the structure against the source book, since the EPUB can differ from the printed edition.