Get the text of an EPUB e-book as a TXT or Markdown file, chapter by chapter
Processed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. Checked against sources on 16 Oct 2026.EPUB to Text unpacks a DRM-free EPUB e-book in your browser and saves its text as a .txt or Markdown file, chapter by chapter in reading order. EPUB 2 and 3 books up to 200 MB work, chapters can be left out, and nothing is uploaded.
Press Select an EPUB, or drop the .epub file on the page; it is unpacked and read on your device.
Check the title, author and word count, and open Chapters to leave out a part such as the copyright page.
Choose Plain text (.txt) or Markdown (.md) under Save as.
Press Download, or Copy text to paste it somewhere else.
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.
Two formats.
| 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 |
Scripts, styles and hidden markup are dropped; images become their description in square brackets where the book has one; character references such as é become the real letters.
Choose the chapters. Every part of the book is listed with its title from the table of contents and its word count, so a cover, copyright page or index can be left out before downloading.
DRM. Books protected by a shop are encrypted. The page checks META-INF/encryption.xml and says so instead of producing nonsense; font obfuscation, which only protects embedded fonts, does not stop it.
Every step was tested on synthetic e-books packed by a separate ZIP and DEFLATE implementation, with the expected text written out by hand. Nothing is uploaded.
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.
Not if it is protected. Books sold with DRM, such as Kindle, Apple Books and Adobe-protected EPUBs, have encrypted chapters that only the shop's own app can open, and the page says so when it finds encryption. DRM-free EPUBs, such as public-domain books and many independent publishers' titles, convert normally.
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.
Yes. Open Chapters to see every part of the book in reading order with its word count, and untick the parts you do not want. Parts with no text, such as a cover image, are already left out. The download and the word count follow your choice.
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.
Still stuck? Ask about EPUB to Text and anybody who knows can answer. No account needed.
Same job, other tools: Word to Plain Text – Take the words out of a .docx and leave the formatting · Markdown to Plain Text – Strip every Markdown mark and keep the words.