Show the Working

EPUB to FB2

Your book never leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make this work. A FictionBook is one XML file, so there is nothing to unzip and no library to fetch.

…or drop one anywhere on this page.

Back the other way, for a reader that wants FictionBook.

The book's chapters become sections and its metadata becomes a <title-info> block. The author's name is split into the first, middle and last name elements the format defines — one word is treated as a surname, two as first and last, and anything more puts the remainder in the middle. That is a guess, it is the least wrong one available, and it is said here rather than hidden.

What a FictionBook is

One XML file holding the whole book: a <description> with the title, author and language, a <body> of nested <section> elements holding the text, and the pictures base64-encoded in <binary> elements at the end. No container and no manifest. Open one in a text editor and you can read it, which is more than can be said for most book formats.

A .fb2.zip is an ordinary ZIP with the FictionBook inside it — a great many library downloads come that way. Unzip it first and hand over the .fb2; this page will tell you if you give it the zipped one rather than failing without explanation.

FictionBook has no lists, and that is the format

There is no list element in FictionBook. Not an unordered one, not a numbered one, nothing — at any version anything actually implements. A bulleted list in an FB2 is a run of paragraphs each beginning with a bullet character, because that is the only way to write one, and every reader displays it that way.

So going in, a list is flattened to bulleted paragraphs and the number of items is reported. Coming out, a run of bulleted paragraphs is not guessed back into a list: a paragraph legitimately starting with a dash is common, and guessing wrongly rewrites somebody's book. This was settled by looking at what pandoc writes when pandoc makes an FB2, not by assuming.

What else does not come across

Pictures inside the EPUB are named rather than carried into the FictionBook. Putting them in means pulling each one out of the book and base64-encoding it into a <binary> element, which is worth doing and is not done yet — so it is reported rather than quietly skipped. Tables become one paragraph per row.

There is no FB2 to PDF here, for the reason there is none anywhere on this site: a PDF fixes text to a page of a particular size and a book deliberately reflows, so something would have to choose your page size, your typeface and where every break falls. An e-reader or Calibre will do it with those choices in front of you.

Where to go next