FlipPDF to ePUB (freeware)

FlipPDF to ePUB can batch-convert any number of PDF documents into EPUB electronic books. Together with the program’s “Batch Convert Mode”, it also offers you a “Hot Directories Mode”, which will monitor a given folder or directory and convert into EPUB any new PDF files as soon as they are added to it.

Though PDF is a document file format that is also supported by most of the e-book readers that can open EPUB files, the reading experience they both provide is radically different. The text in PDF files is static, which means that it cannot be reflowed by e-book reading devices. Reflowable text is one of the beauties of XML- and HTML-based e-books, as it allows the user to change the font size and have the layout of the book re-arranged accordingly. The layout of a PDF page, on the contrary, cannot be modified in any way, so PDF documents will be presented on a page-by-page basis. E-readers with tiny screens (i.e., the iPod family or most mobile phones) find this lack of flexibility quite annoying. FlipPDF to ePUB will extract the text behind the rigid PDF layout and transform it into HTML/XML reflowable text. The program takes special care to ensure that all interactive, non-textual, and layout elements are correctly converted – hyperlinks, images, tables, etc.

Due to the peculiar way in which text is stored in PDF documents (where layout takes precedence over text), FlipPDF to ePUB – nor any other PDF to EPUB converter for that matter – cannot guarantee a 100% accurate rendition of the original layout of the document. The entire text will be there, but hard line returns and blank lines may appear unexpectedly in any part of the page, among other inconsistencies. This should not detract anything from the program’s functionality – it just cannot be helped.