EPUB to TXT

This tool pulls the readable prose out of an EPUB and hands you a clean .txt file. It fits the moment you need the words without the packaging: feeding a manuscript into a word counter, grammar checker, or readability tool that only accepts plain text; pasting a chapter into a translation or summarization workflow; or quoting passages into notes, a CMS, or an email without dragging along EPUB styling and markup.

Editors get a proofreading or diffable copy, students can lift a chapter for citation, and developers get UTF-8 plain text for indexing or analysis.

Drop or select a single .epub file. Everything runs in your browser, which unpacks the archive and reads each page with its own HTML parser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing remains after you close the tab. The tool follows the book's reading order, skips pages marked as outside it and anything that is not HTML, and strips out navigation, scripts, and styles so only body text survives. Paragraphs and headings stay separated by blank lines, line breaks inside a paragraph (as in verse) are kept, and list items and table rows each get their own line.

Each chapter appears as a checkbox with its title and word count, so you can include the whole book or pick specific sections. Titles come from the table of contents (nav.xhtml or toc.ncx) when present, falling back to the first heading on the page or the file name. Two toggles control the result: include chapter headings (title plus an underline rule) and separate chapters with a --- divider. When you are happy, download the .txt or copy the text to your clipboard.

It does not keep bold, italic or links, page numbers, or text inside images, and DRM-protected files are refused.

Because extraction reads the text of each page, anything that is not text is lost. Text baked into images and equations drawn as images do not appear at all, and tables come through as rows of cell text without the grid. Footnotes appear wherever they sit in the page, which may be mid-chapter or at the end. Code blocks keep their line breaks but lose their indentation, because runs of spaces are collapsed into one.

Chapter splitting mirrors how the book was built, not how you read it. A publisher who packed many chapters into one HTML file will surface as one big chunk; one who split a chapter across files will show several entries. Front matter, copyright pages, and ad pages count as chapters too, so scan the list before exporting. Very short fragments of ten characters or fewer are dropped entirely.

Open the downloaded file and skim end to end. Confirm the chapters you wanted are present and in the right order, that headings line up with the actual sections, and that no chapter is silently truncated or merged. Spot-check the start and end of a few chapters, where split points and front- or back-matter problems tend to hide.

Watch for stray artifacts: page-number remnants, repeated running headers, or footnote markers that landed mid-sentence. If a section you expected is missing, it was likely an image, a page outside the reading order, or a fragment too short to keep. Compare the on-screen word count against your expectation as a quick sanity signal.

For official or legal use, check exact wording against the original EPUB before quoting or filing it.