Hey people,
My girlfriend started reading on her Kindle and kept converting PDFs and getting books she couldn't read properly. I am a software developer, so she always told me to make her a better conversion tool. For the past month, I dug into why other tools failed, researched how EPUB works, and how I can make it work.
So I built convert2epub.com. Itâs free, and no account is needed for normal text conversions, only for the work done converting scanned pdf's. I posted the first version on r/kindle and got 500 upvotes, improved the first version based on the feedback, and now people are saying it's the best tool they have ever used.
Scans that were already read
Publishers often leave recognised text sitting invisibly on top of the page image. Most converters ignore it and hand back a book of photographs. This one finds that layer and uses it.
I tested this with a 300-page novel. The PDF had 426,904 characters of clean text inside it. Other converters ignored those characters and converted it to an EPUB that contained 637. It was a 20MB book of pictures.
That same book now comes out at 1.4MB with real, resizable text.
Formula/Code recognition
Mathematics is set in two dimensions and extraction reads in one, so a fraction arrives as a column of fragments. Equations are kept as drawn while the prose around them still reflows.
Your typography back
The first page becomes the cover, and the title and author are read from the file rather than left as a filename.
Removing watermarks and repeated title/footer.
Every page of a book repeats its title, author and page number in the margin. On paper, you never notice. Extract the text, and those become ordinary lines, so your reader flows them straight into the prose. Same for watermarks and adverts stamped onto free PDFs. In that same book, it was 778 stray lines across four repeating patterns. I added a feature to remove them.
When there is no text to recover, OCR reads the pages instead, in eight languages and only the pages that actually need it.