Installation

Run it without installing anything permanently, with uv:

$ uvx ebook-convert book.epub book.mobi

Or install it as a tool:

$ uv tool install ebook-convert      # with uv
$ pipx install ebook-convert         # with pipx
$ pip install ebook-convert          # into the current environment

Single-file executables for Linux (x86_64, aarch64) and macOS (arm64, x86_64) that need no Python at all are attached to each GitHub release.

Optional system tools:

• pdftohtml, pdfinfo and pdftoppm from poppler are needed in $PATH for conversion from PDF.

• Liberation fonts are used when embedding fonts into LRF output.

Markdown-formatted text input additionally needs the markdown package: pip install 'ebook-convert[markdown]'.

Usage

$ ebook-convert INPUT OUTPUT [-v|-q]

The formats are taken from the file extensions. -v makes the output more verbose (repeat for more), -q quieter.

What’s supported

Development

$ git clone https://github.com/NunoSempere/ebook-convert
$ cd ebook-convert
$ ./make.sh install        # uv sync: creates .venv with dev dependencies
$ ./make.sh test           # pytest
$ ./make.sh build          # sdist + wheel into dist/
$ ./make.sh binary         # single-file executable via PyInstaller

Releasing: bump version in pyproject.toml and numeric_version in ebook_convert/constants_old.py, commit, then tag vX.Y.Z and push the tag. The release.yml workflow runs the tests, publishes to PyPI through trusted publishing, builds the binaries and attaches everything to a GitHub release. To publish by hand instead, run UV_PUBLISH_TOKEN=pypi-... ./make.sh publish after ./make.sh build.

Background

In gryf’s words, the original project started as “an impudent ripoff of the conversion bits from Calibre”, with the aim of having only the converter, runnable from the command line, without the rest of Calibre, and with a cleaner, more pythonic code base. Qt and GUI code were removed and most vendored third-party modules replaced by their PyPI versions. This fork adds PyPI packaging, binaries, a test-suite, and swaps the HTML5 parser for the pure-Python html5lib instead of a C extension that had to be compiled against a matching libxml2.

Note that Calibre itself installs a command with the same name, ebook-convert. If you have Calibre installed, whichever comes first on your $PATH wins; uvx ebook-convert always runs this one.

There is no Python 2 support and there will not be.

License

This work is licensed under GPL3, like the original. See LICENSE for details.