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.

Related projects

Tools that get books into a format this converter understands, or that cover ground it does not:

• FicHub: paste a fanfiction URL, get an EPUB (also MOBI, PDF or zipped HTML). Covers FanFiction.net, FictionPress, SpaceBattles, SufficientVelocity, QuestionableQuesting and more. Source is on GitHub.

• WebToEpub: browser extension (Chrome, Firefox) that turns the web novel or serial you are reading into an EPUB for offline reading; supports Archive of Our Own, FanFiction.net, Royal Road, Baka-Tsuki and many others. Code is on GitHub.

• FanFicFare: command-line tool and Calibre plugin that downloads fanfiction from a long list of sites into EPUB, with metadata.

• Calibre itself: the full application this converter was extracted from, with the complete ebook-convert including the formats not ported here (AZW3 output, PDF output, LIT, SVG rasterization, …).

• pandoc: universal document converter; the usual choice for turning Markdown, LaTeX or Word documents into EPUB.

• kepubify: converts EPUB to Kobo’s KEPUB flavour.

• Kindle Comic Converter: comics and manga (CBZ, CBR, images) to Kindle- and Kobo-friendly files.

License

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