PDFSwift › EPUB tools › EPUB Text Extractor
✂ EPUBFree · runs in your browserExtract Text, Chapters and Quotations From an EPUB
Pull text out of an EPUB in the shape you need: the whole book, one file per chapter, every quotation found between quotation marks, or all passages that contain a word or phrase.
Drop an EPUB here
or choose a file from your device
What this tool does
Researchers, students, translators and writers regularly need pieces of a book rather than a whole converted file. This tool offers four extractions on the same loaded EPUB so that you do not have to convert twice.
Full text produces the same plain text as EPUB to TXT, shown in a box you can copy from. Chapter files writes one numbered text file per reading-order item, named after the table-of-contents entry when one exists. Quotations lists passages enclosed in curly, straight or guillemet quotation marks between 20 and 600 characters long. Passage search finds every occurrence of a word or phrase and shows about 160 characters of context on both sides.
Quotation finding is a heuristic. It relies on the punctuation the author or publisher used. Books that mark dialogue with dashes, or that use unusual quotation conventions, will return fewer or no results; the tool says so rather than guessing.
How to use this tool
- Choose an EPUB with the file picker or drag it onto the page.
- Pick one of the four modes. For Passages containing… type the word or phrase to look for; matching ignores upper and lower case.
- Press Extract. Results appear below with counts.
- Use the download button to save the text, the chapters ZIP, the quotations or the passages as a
.txt/.zipfile. You can also select and copy from the page. - Change the mode and press Extract again; the book stays loaded, so no re-upload is needed.
Supported formats and limitations
- Input: EPUB 2 and EPUB 3.
- Output: UTF-8 text files, or a ZIP of chapter files.
- Quotation marks recognised: “ ”, straight double quotes, « » and „ “.
- Search: case-insensitive substring match across the whole text, at most 300 passages.
- Display cap: the on-page preview shows at most 60,000 characters; downloads are complete.
- Input: EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 files (
.epub), up to 100 MB. Anything else is rejected before processing. - Archive safety: files with unsafe paths (such as
../), duplicate entries, more than 8,000 entries or an expanded size above 500 MB are refused. - Not supported: DRM-protected books and books with encrypted or font-obfuscated resources (
META-INF/encryption.xml) can be opened for inspection but cannot be converted or merged. - Memory: the whole book is held in your browser’s memory. Very large illustrated books may fail on a phone; a desktop browser has far more headroom.
Privacy and safety
This tool runs entirely in your browser. When you choose a file it is read by JavaScript on this page; it is not uploaded to PDFSwift or to any other server, and the result is created on your device and handed to you as a download. Closing or reloading the tab discards the book from memory.
The page shows advertising supplied by a third party. Advertising scripts run separately from the tool and never receive your book. If you prefer, you can disconnect from the internet after the page has loaded and the tool will still work.
Frequently asked questions
How do I extract text from an EPUB?
Load the book, keep the Full text mode and press Extract. Copy from the box or download the .txt.
Can I get each chapter as its own file?
Yes. Choose One text file per chapter and download the ZIP. Files are numbered in reading order and named from the table of contents when available.
How are quotations found?
By matching text enclosed in quotation marks that is 20 to 600 characters long. Because it depends on punctuation, results vary from book to book.
Is the search case-sensitive?
No. It finds the phrase in any capitalisation and shows surrounding context.
Is anything uploaded?
No. Everything is extracted by code running on this page. There is no server step.
Does it work with non-English books?
Yes. Text is handled as Unicode. Quotation detection covers the common Latin, French and German marks; other conventions may need the full-text or search mode.
Why do I get fewer quotations than I expected?
Dialogue marked with dashes or single quotes is not matched by design, to avoid treating apostrophes as quotation marks. Use passage search for those cases.