How to Convert a PDF to EPUB (and EPUB to PDF)

Convert PDF to EPUB

1. Open the Documents tool.
2. Drop your PDF onto the upload area (up to 50 MB).
3. Under From choose PDF, and under To choose EPUB.
4. Press Convert, download the EPUB and open it in your reading app or send it to your e-reader.

Anvil takes the text from each page of the PDF and builds an EPUB book from it, with one chapter per page. Because the text is stored as text, the e-reader can change the font size, line spacing and theme the way it does for any other book.

What to expect from a PDF to EPUB conversion

This works best for text-heavy PDFs such as novels, articles, essays and reports. It does not recreate the page design, so images, diagrams, tables, multi-column layouts and footnotes will not look like the original. Page numbers and running headers that appear on every page may show up as ordinary text between chapters.

If your PDF is a scan, there is no text to take, and Anvil does not perform OCR. Run the scan through an OCR tool first.

Convert EPUB to PDF

1. Open the Documents tool and drop your EPUB file in.
2. Under From choose EPUB, and under To choose PDF.
3. Press Convert and download the PDF.

Each chapter of the book is rendered to PDF pages and the chapters are joined in order, so you get a single document that is easy to print or share.

EPUB files protected by DRM, which includes many books bought from stores, cannot be converted, and Anvil does not remove DRM. Books you wrote yourself, public domain books and DRM-free purchases convert normally.

Which format should you keep?

• Keep the PDF when layout, images and page numbers matter, such as forms, scientific papers with figures, and anything printed.
• Use EPUB for long reading on a phone or an e-reader, where resizable text matters more than layout.
• Keep your original source files. Converting between fixed and flowing formats always loses something, so work from the source where possible.

Related conversions

If you want to edit a PDF rather than read it, see converting PDF to DOCX. To publish your own writing as an ebook or PDF, start from Markdown with the guide on converting Markdown to PDF.

Try it now

Open the Documents tool. It is free, needs no account, and your files are deleted right after conversion.

Related guides

• How to Convert a PDF to a Word Document (DOCX)
• How to Convert Markdown to PDF, DOCX or HTML
• How to Convert a Word Document (DOCX) to PDF