Calibre should be able to convert from one to the other. Pandoc as well if you prefer CLI things.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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Calibre does not do the job
I just checked and tested it, works for me. Is there anything unusual about the PDF?
Iβve done It before. Itβs just highly dependent on the PDF. What software made the pdf? What format was it in prior to being a PDF? Is it a scanned image of text? Or does it have actual text.
Another option, that might work better, might not, though it would be more work, is use something like Microsoft Word first. Word can open a PDF and βconvertβ it to Word format. After that, you spend a lot of time fixing all the formatting which will probably be fucked up.
And then, once you have a nice clean Word doc, convert that to epub.
I've had some trouble with PDFs that were just images of pages of text (easy way to tell, assuming you're on linux, is run pdftotext on it and see if you get anything). There's a utility called pdfsandwich that will use Tesseract to OCR the images and add text to the PDF.
That might help too.
Thx crude scans are the only way you can get a lot of the more fringe books on https://annas-archive.li/ etc.
Pandoc can do epub to PDF but not the other way.
Hm. I stand corrected. I could swear it did both ways.
I guess better check latest version. But pdf is a pain, it places letters geometrically and loses information about stuff like text flow. You have to use heuristics to put the words and sentences back together.
Calibre will work for this, but it almost certainly won't give a good result. That's not Calibre's fault; Adobe InDesign produces exactly the same horrible output from a PDF. It's just a reality that PDF does not lend itself gracefully to being converted easily to a well behaved EPUB.
Unless you are converting something extremely simple with no inline images or interesting text layout, getting a nice EPUB will almost definitely be a tedious process of fiddling directly with the HTML and CSS with something like Sigil (or Calibre, but it's not as nice).
Calibre claims to do it.
I just tried it on Writing Fiction for Dummies, which is heavily formatted with lots of graphics, etc. It did not do a good job. Two columns on one page broke it. If you have a simple book, it will probably work.
Yeeeah to get nice results you have to do a fair bit of tinkering. Almost never worth it unless PDF is the only thing you can get.
Better off reading pdf in a reformatter like GoodReader. I dont know how the hell they do it but they cracked the pdf cleaning up game
If you must get a PDF book into EPUB, and keep all the formatting, the only way to do it is to convert the PDF to images first. It makes a huge file, of course, but it works, I just tried it.
You can convert the PDF into images for free at smallpdf.com, then when it's done converting, you can merge the images back into one big PDF file on that same website. Then, you can use Calibre to convert that PDF of images into EPUB.
will test this
Depends on the PDF... It's a container format - so it depends on what it contains.
So the easy answer to your simple question is, that yes, it's doable - sometimes, and sometimes it is not.
I've done it with Calibre.
Results vary, but if it's a simple enough document without too many images or formatting, it should come out very readable.
I've been using this site to convert to PDF for forever, so I'm assuming it'll also be good for the other way around
Calibre does not do the job
There's something tricky about converting pdf to epub that I can never get to work properly. Maybe it's too do with the way the pdf is put together?
I could highlight the text of the pdf and paste it into a document but it would come out different in places. I tried this experiment because the calibre conversion was doing the same thing.
I tried many online converters but none of them could do it either. In the end, I read the converted epub and just had to mentally correct the words that didn't properly convert.
To anyone hassling in the future with this: Open pdf with Abby Reader OCR-->Export to Epub-->Use Calibre to convert Epub to Mobi