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drevicko
Asked: 2012-02-08 23:07:47 +0800 CST

How can I convert .epub files to plain text?

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I'm able to view an epub file in, say, okular, select all the text and copy-paste into a text editor. I'd like a command line method - anyone know of such a thing?

format-conversion epub

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I don't know if Calibre is worth installing for your job, but if you have it you could use the powerful ebook converter:

    ebook-convert input.epub output.txt

    Output format is deducted from output file extension

    I imagine there could be some XML tools/scripts (XSLT) that can transform epub in text as epub is basically XHTML in ZIP archive

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  2. An alternative is epub2txt by Kevin Boone, available on Github.

    epub2html is a simple command-line utility for extracting text from EPUB documents and, optionally, re-flowing it to fit a text display of a particular number of columns. It is written entirely in ANSI-standard C.

    Usage example:

    epub2txt input.epub > output.txt
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  3. MuPDF can convert from epub to html and txt. To install it:

    sudo apt install mupdf mupdf-tools

    To use it:

    mutool convert -o somefilename.txt somefilename.epub

    It assumes txt output from the -o option.

    See mutool convert documentation for more information.

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  4. Maybe Calibre can suit your needs.

    See What formats does calibre support conversion to/from? for information on supported formats.

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  5. To convert an epub document to plain text from terminal:

    pandoc input.epub | lynx --stdin --dump > output.txt

    It is assumed that pandoc and lynx are already installed.

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