Convert EPUB to PDF

A reflowable book becoming a fixed one

An EPUB has no pages. It is a small website in a zip — chapters as HTML, a stylesheet, embedded fonts, and a spine listing the reading order — and the reason it has no pages is that the reader makes them, from your chosen font size on your chosen screen. Converting to PDF means committing to one of those layouts forever. This is a real loss, not a technicality: the page numbers in the result correspond to nothing in any other edition, and nobody can make the text bigger afterwards. Convert when a book has to be printed, annotated on paper, or sent somewhere that only takes PDFs — not for comfortable reading, where the EPUB is strictly better.

What comes across is the book as its own stylesheet asks for it. Chapters are laid out in spine order, the embedded fonts are used, headings and drop caps and pull quotes keep their styling, and images sit where the markup puts them. The table of contents becomes the PDF's bookmark sidebar where the book declares one properly, and internal cross-references — footnote markers, "see chapter 4" — become working links inside the PDF. Text stays real text, so the result is searchable and quotable.

Some things simply have no equivalent. A cover that was a separate image becomes the first page. Pop-up footnotes, which good e-readers show without leaving the page, become ordinary notes wherever the markup places them. Media overlays, audio, and anything interactive are dropped. Fixed-layout EPUBs — children's books, comics, textbooks — are already page-shaped and convert far more predictably than reflowable ones, which is worth knowing before you judge the result.

DRM is absolute and honest about it. A book bought from a store that locks it cannot be opened by this or by any other converter, because the file is encrypted to a key we do not have and would not be entitled to use. Books from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, most publishers' direct sales and anything you made yourself carry no DRM and convert normally. If our server is unreachable, the page says so and rebuilds the book locally, keeping chapters, text and images while dropping the book's own stylesheet and its link navigation.

When you want something else

Calibre is the right tool for anything beyond a one-off, and it is free. Its converter gives you control over page size, margins, font size and embedded fonts, it can insert a proper table of contents, and it handles MOBI, AZW3, FB2 and a dozen other formats the same way. ebook-convert book.epub book.pdf --pdf-page-size a4 is the command line behind the interface, and it converts a whole library in a loop.

For a book you intend to actually read, converting at all is usually the wrong move. Almost every e-reader, phone and tablet opens EPUB directly, and the reflowable text will be more comfortable than any PDF of it — particularly on a small screen, where a fixed A4 page means pinching and panning on every page.