Convert EPUB to Markdown

Turn .epub books into structured Markdown — chapters as headings, text flowing cleanly — for quoting, note-taking, and building searchable personal archives. Entirely on your Mac.

How to convert an EPUB

1. Drop the .epub file into Milldown.DRM-free EPUBs only — purchased books with DRM can't be read by any converter.
2. The book's chapters convert in order, with headings preserved.
3. Save as one Markdown file, or split it.Refine → Export Chunks splits by chapter headings into ~1–2k-token pieces — ideal for feeding a book to an AI a piece at a time.

What people use it for

• Reading notes — pull chapters into Obsidian where quotes link to your own thinking.
• Study — ask an AI questions about a chapter by pasting exactly that chapter.
• Personal archives — public-domain and DRM-free books, in a format that outlives every e-reader.

Notes

Footnotes convert inline where the EPUB structure allows. Embedded images aren't carried into the text. For public-domain books, Project Gutenberg EPUBs convert beautifully.

What you get back

• The book’s metadata first — title, author, language, publisher and date, taken from the EPUB’s own record rather than from the filename.
• Chapters in reading order. An EPUB carries an explicit spine describing the order the book is meant to be read in, and that is the order used — not alphabetical filenames, which in many books bear no relation to the sequence.
• Structure preserved. Chapter and section headings stay headings, block quotes stay quotes, lists stay lists. A converted book keeps an outline you can navigate.
• Footnote and endnote links survive as links, because an EPUB is HTML underneath and the note anchors come across with it.

What it will not do

• DRM-protected books cannot be opened. A book bought from a store that encrypts its files is not readable by any converter without stripping the protection first, which Milldown does not do. Only DRM-free EPUBs convert — which covers most technical publishers, public-domain libraries and anything you made yourself.
• Illustrations become references, not pictures. An image-led book — a photography monograph, a children’s book — converts to its captions and little else.
• Page numbers do not exist to preserve. EPUB is reflowable text, so there are no fixed pages; cite by chapter and heading instead.
• Fixed-layout EPUBs convert poorly. Comics, cookbooks and heavily designed titles use a format where position carries meaning, which flat text cannot represent.

A note on what you are allowed to do with the output

Converting a book you own for your own reading, searching, annotation or study is one thing; redistributing the result is another, and copyright applies to the text exactly as it did inside the EPUB. Milldown changes the format, not the licence.

Further reading: Importing Word docs and PDFs into Obsidian · Batch-converting a folder of Word and PDF files