How to use the epub text extractor
- Choose an EPUB file or drop it on the box. It can be up to 25 MB, and it is read on your device.
- Keep a divider line with the chapter title ticked if you want a marker between chapters, and skip parts outside the main reading order to leave out covers, notes and similar extras that the book marks as separate.
- Read the title, author, chapter table and word counts, then check the text in the box.
- Use Copy text or Download .txt to keep the result.
How an EPUB is read
An EPUB is a ZIP archive with a small index. The tool reads the index to find the package file, then follows the "spine", the list that gives the order in which the chapters are meant to be read. Each chapter is an XHTML page, and the tool turns it into plain text: paragraphs and headings become lines, line breaks stay, a table row becomes one line with tab characters between the cells, and preformatted text keeps its spaces.
Styles, scripts, fonts, pictures and footnote links are left out. Character entities such as the non-breaking space, the ellipsis and curly quotes are turned into the real characters. The chapter title comes from the first heading in the chapter, or from its page title when there is no heading.
Books that cannot be read
Some books are protected with digital rights management, which encrypts the chapters. The tool refuses these and says so, because the text cannot be read without a key. Fonts that are only scrambled to prevent copying do not hide the text, so books that use that are still read. A book with no listed chapters, or with chapters missing from the archive, gets a clear message and a count of the parts it could not find.
Only files you have the right to use should be opened. To read other documents as text, see the Word Text Extractor and PDF to Text, and to count the words in the result, the Word Frequency Counter.
More file tools
To convert other files or inspect an image, try the ICS to CSV Converter, Image Histogram Viewer and Reduce Image Colors Tool.
Assumptions and limits
- The file is a standard EPUB without copy protection. Files up to 25 MB and 3,000 parts are read.
- Chapters appear in the book's own reading order.
- Only text is extracted; layout, images, fonts and styles are not kept.
- The file is processed in your browser and is never uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my book open with only a few chapters?
Some books put the whole text into a few large files, so one entry in the table can be many pages. The word counts in the table show how big each part is.
What does skipping parts outside the main reading order do?
Books can mark some pages, such as covers or notes, as not part of the main sequence. With the box ticked they are left out, and without it they are included.
Why does the page say the book is protected?
The chapters are encrypted with a rights management system. Only the program the book was bought for can decrypt them, so this tool cannot read the text.
Does it work with Kindle files?
No. It reads the EPUB format only. Books in other formats need to be converted to EPUB by a program you trust first.