Free EPUB to TXT converter

EPUB to TXT converter that still reads like a book

To convert EPUB to TXT, choose your file: epubwise writes clean UTF-8 text with poems, tables, headings and footnote marks in place, free and without an account.

Convert an EPUB to TXT

  • No sign-up
  • Deleted within an hour
  • Opens in any reading app

Free: 10 files a day. Only convert books you have the right to convert. DRM-protected books, such as most store-bought Kindle books, can't be converted.

leaves-of-grass.txt epubwise
Unfix’d yet fix’d,
Ever shall be, ever have been and are,
Sweeping the present to the infinite future,
Eidólons, eidólons, eidólons.

The prophet and the bard,
Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet,
Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them,
God and eidólons.
Passages from two public-domain EPUBs: Calibre's default text first, then the file epubwise made. Both are unedited output, and each arrow is a tab left in the file.

What plain text is good for

What changes in the TXT

  1. Kept

    Every word in reading order, with headings, poem lines, lists, table columns and footnote marks set out so they still read properly.

  2. Dropped

    Pictures, fonts, italics and links: plain text can't hold them. A picture's description stays as a line of text when the book has one.

  3. Encoding

    UTF-8, so accented letters and other alphabets come through correctly.

How it compares: 3 EPUB to TXT converters tested

Tested 4 and 5 November 2026. Three harder public-domain books went through each converter with default settings: Pride and Prejudice and Leaves of Grass (Standard Ebooks) and The Wealth of Nations (Project Gutenberg), which has a table of wheat prices. One script measured every file the same way. FreeConvert has no EPUB to TXT converter.

ConverterText kept Lines starting with stray tabsPoem lines stay together Table keeps its columns Headings markedNote marks like [1]
epubwise Calibre 9.17, our own text writer 98.7–99.9%0YesYes 55510
Calibre (default settings) Calibre 9.13, the desktop program 98.7–99.9%13,146NoNo 00
online-convert.com 98.7–99.9%13,146NoNo 00

What the numbers say. Every converter keeps the words. The difference is whether the result reads like a book. Calibre carries the source file's own indentation into the text, so 13,146 lines across the two Standard Ebooks titles start with tabs, and it leaves a blank line after every line of a poem, so a stanza of four lines takes up eight. A table typed with spaces comes out as one long line of numbers, and a real table as a stack of single cells. online-convert.com gave the same result, down to the size of the Leaves of Grass file.

epubwise has its own text writer for this. Paragraphs start at the margin, poems keep their lines and stanzas, tables keep their columns, headings are underlined, lists keep their markers, footnotes show as [1], and printed page numbers from the original are left out of the sentences. A picture's description is kept as a line of text when the book has one.

Where others did better: no measured column here went to another converter, and the words were level. Line spacing is the one place a person might prefer otherwise: some contents lists come out as tight lines rather than spaced paragraphs. CloudConvert, Convertio and AnyConv haven't been measured on these books yet.

Before you convert

Only DRM-free EPUBs can be converted. Want to keep the layout instead? A PDF keeps it on fixed pages. Going the other way, from a text file to an ebook, is TXT to EPUB. epubwise's own text writer does the conversion on our server, and the file is deleted within an hour.

Questions

Are the chapters kept in the TXT?

Yes, in order. A plain text file has no contents menu, so each chapter title sits on its own line, underlined, and is easy to find with search.

Are tables and poems kept in the TXT?

Yes. Tables keep their rows and columns, and poems keep their lines and stanzas. The other converters we tested broke tables up and left a blank line between the lines of a poem.

Can I convert the TXT back into an ebook?

Yes, with TXT to EPUB, though pictures and formatting removed in the first step can't come back.