Turn an e-book into Markdown with its headings, italics, bold and lists kept
Processed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. Checked against sources on 16 Oct 2026.Markdown keeps the shape of a book that plain text throws away: chapter headings become # lines, italics and bold keep their marks, and lists stay lists. This page opens with Markdown chosen, so the file drops straight into Obsidian, a static site or a note app. Chapters are separated by a horizontal rule, the title and author come first, and nothing is uploaded.
Drop your files or click to choose them.
Adjust the options and check the preview.
Download the result. Nothing was uploaded.
Text from an e-book is useful for reading on a device with no EPUB app, for searching a whole book at once, for feeding notes and quotes into a writing tool, and for text-to-speech. Copying it page by page from a reader is slow and drops paragraphs.
How an EPUB is read. An EPUB is a ZIP archive. Its file META-INF/container.xml names the package document, whose spine lists the chapters in the order the publisher set, and each chapter is an XHTML page. The page follows that chain exactly, so the text comes out in reading order, not in the order the files happen to be stored.
| Save as | Keeps | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Plain text (.txt) | paragraphs, line breaks, list items | e-readers, search, text-to-speech |
| Markdown (.md) | also headings, bold, italic | Obsidian, notes, static sites |
The rest of the article, and all 6 questions about EPUB to Text, are on the EPUB to Text page.
Drop the .epub file on EPUB to Text. The book is unpacked in your browser, its chapters are read in reading order, and a preview appears straight away. Press Download to save a .txt file named after the book, or Copy text to paste it. E-books up to 200 MB work.
Paragraphs, line breaks, chapter order and list items are kept in both formats. Markdown also keeps headings as # lines and bold and italic text as ** and _ marks. Images are replaced by their description in square brackets when the book provides one, and table cells are separated by tabs.
Both. Chapter titles come from the EPUB 3 navigation document or, in older EPUB 2 books, from the NCX table of contents. The reading order always follows the book's spine, the order its publisher set, so the text comes out in the order you would read it.
No. The EPUB is unpacked and read by your own browser with no server involved, and the text file is created on your device. Nothing about the book, including its title, is sent anywhere. Closing the tab clears it from memory.
Rates and rules change; check the source before you rely on a figure.
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Same job, other tools: Word to Markdown – Convert a .docx document into Markdown you can commit · HTML to Markdown – Turn a saved page or a fragment into clean Markdown.