EPUB to HTML — packaged chapters become a single reflowed page
A public-domain ebook is being placed on a class site as one continuous reading page. The conversion walks the ebook's spine, joins the listed chapter documents in that order, and emits sanitized markup. The packaging that made it an ebook — per-chapter CSS, navigation, page numbers, images — is removed along the way, so what you get is a plain document, not a book.
Page layout, fonts, margins, headers, footers and page breaks are not reproduced: the text stream is reflowed, not re-laid-out.
Processed on your device. Files aren’t sent anywhere.
From packaged chapters to one page
Follow one ebook through the stages.
- The archive is opened and the spine is read, so the reading sequence is established before any text is taken.
- Each spine-listed chapter document is parsed; unreferenced files are never touched.
- Chapter markup is reflowed into elements: headings, paragraphs, lists, tables.
- The chapters are joined in spine order into one document.
- The result is sanitized: scripts, styles and unsafe links are removed.
- A single .html file is produced, capped at 400000 characters.
Where the chapter boundaries go
Chapter headings usually survive as heading elements, so the outline of the book is still visible. What disappears is the visual break: the ebook's own CSS that started each chapter on a new page, its page numbers and its navigation list.
On your site the chapters therefore run together as one column. If you want visible breaks, add them yourself with the site's stylesheet — the converter does not invent styling, and original styling is not carried.
What the sanitizer removes from the packaging
Ebook packaging contains more than text, and none of the executable or presentational parts belong in the output.
| Packaging element | In the HTML output | Effect on reading |
|---|---|---|
| Spine-listed chapter text | kept in spine order | the book reads in the intended sequence |
| Chapter headings | kept as heading elements | outline visible, page breaks absent |
| Per-chapter CSS | removed | your site supplies the appearance |
| Images and cover art | dropped | captions arrive without figures |
| Navigation list | not carried as navigation | no chapter jump menu |
| Scripts and unsafe links | removed | nothing executes, unsafe destinations are dropped |
Reading the result as a page
The output behaves like a long article rather than a book.
- One document, one scroll: there is no page turning and no chapter switching.
- Only spine-listed content appears, so a chapter missing from the spine is missing from the page.
- Tables reflow to your site's width instead of the ebook's page size.
- Footnote behaviour depends on the output format, so check the notes you expect in the converted page.
- One file up to 8 MiB is accepted; ZIP entries are limited to 4 MiB each and 16 MiB total, so an oversized archive is rejected rather than partially converted.