kepubify v4: A fast, standalone EPUB to Kobo EPUB converter

[geek1011]

kepubify v4
Convert EPUBs to Kobo EPUBs.

Features:

• Standalone and cross platform.
• Works from the command line (also by dragging and dropping on Windows).
• Also has a web interface.
• Fast (40-80x faster than converting with Calibre).
• Optionally custom CSS, smarten punctuation, find/replace, and more.
• Automatically fix common problems which cause layout issues for KEPUBs.
• Optionally pre-convert books for use in Calibre.
• Batch conversion with control over the output file structure (see here for detailed examples).
• Nearly identical output to KEPUBs from the Kobo Store.
• Standalone tool to pre-generate cover images (including aspect ratio changes, grayscale, and color inversion).
• Standalone tool to update the database with Calibre or EPUB3 series metadata.
• Well-tested.

Website | Download | Web Version

[geek1011]

What's new in Kepubify v4?

Highlights:

• Conversion is now 3 to 6 times faster than v3 (making it 40 to 80 times faster than a Calibre conversion on average).
• Kepubify has a new web app which supports most conversion options and doesn't upload files to a remote server.
• Kepubify can now fix layout issues caused by books without a standalone cover page.
• HTML content files with non-standard extensions now work correctly.
• There's now a new website with updated documentation and a more concise homepage.

For developers/packagers:

• Building kepubify now requires Go 1.16+.
• Embedding kepubify in other applications doesn't require go.mod changes for the custom x/net/html fork.
• Kepubify now supports the js/wasm platform.
• The test suite now has nearly complete functionality and code coverage.
• The Go API can now stream directly from a fs.FS to a zip.Writer, with additional optimizations for reading from zip.Reader.
• Kepubify is now immune to Zip Slip when converting EPUBs with un-sanitized paths.
• The kepubify CLI interface is identical to v3.

[geek1011]

Changelogs

v4.0.0:

Spoiler:

dd1c0e1 all: Increase major version to v4
bcce233 all: Increase minimum Go version to 1.16
19982c2 cmd/kepubify: Fix pathtransform_test output on Windows
59a7b15 all: Update license year
2d34e47 docs: Replace GA with self-hosted GC
e721d07 docs: Move website to gh-pages branch
948788e kepub: Rewrite conversion code
1031fd2 cmd/kepubify: Replace ioutil with os for Go 1.16
0796deb all: Remove NFPM package builds
40afb6d kepub: Switch to my forked+renamed html package instead of replacing it
7848002 kepub/kobotest: Switch diff library, improve tree formatting and generation
f35a7bf kepub: Process replacements while rendering the content
6c4f7fa all: Update golang.org/x/sync to golang/sync@036812b2e83c0ddf193dd5a34e034151da389d09
f368f3e kepub: Implement fix for books without a titlepage (fixes #33)
9e645a9 cmd/kepubify: Add flag for ConverterOptionDummyTitlepage (#33)
de62f6b kepub: Add tests for entire conversions
195d19f all: Rename LICENSE.md to LICENSE
ffc4d0e kepub: Add internal progress hook
892ef2e cmd/kepubify: Bump major version
2b4cbc3 all: Switch to GitHub Actions
e556743 all: New README
accdcc9 all: Update gitignore
ef74497 all: Fix release build versioning

[geek1011]

Some screenshots of the new website:
_

[koboy]

Originally Posted by geek1011

Some screenshots of the new website:
_

looks good. kepubify is my go to epub to kepub converter.

best wishes koboy

[xyclonei]

Amazing. Tested it out and it is indeed quite fast. Thank you!

[codychan]

Still not interested in writing a kepubify plugin for Calibre?

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by codychan

Still not interested in writing a kepubify plugin for Calibre?

The main difficulty with that is kepubify couldn't use Calibre's conversion pipeline before, and I wasn't sure how to make another plugin add a format to the DB. Someone else did figure out the latter and made a plugin, though: https://github.com/joseluiscd/calibre-kepubify.

I don't have time right now to look into this further, but note that kepubify is now capable of handling unpacked EPUBs, so from what I understand, it should now theoretically be possible to make a plugin for Calibre which ties into the conversion process as well as one which does it separately. But keep in mind that integrating it into the full conversion process would eliminate some of the benefits of using kepubify like performance and minimum HTML manipulation.

[skybook]

I wasn't sure where to post about bugs, so I decided to try here:

I've converted many epubs to kepubs successfully with the downloaded Kepubify4, but with one epub, the punctuation now looks like this: ’, or ‘

For whatever reason, the web interface (so far) seems to have worked

[rtiangha]

Originally Posted by skybook

I wasn't sure where to post about bugs, so I decided to try here:

I've converted many epubs to kepubs successfully with the downloaded Kepubify4, but with one epub, the punctuation now looks like this: ’, or ‘

For whatever reason, the web interface (so far) seems to have worked

Are you sure you're using the latest version? Right now, it's version 4.0.4; there have been some fixes to deal with this.

https://github.com/pgaskin/kepubify/releases

Otherwise, 4.0.1 is the last version before encoding changes were introduced; you may find that version more reliable.

[skybook]

Ah, you're right, I didn't realize there was a newer version. Thanks!

[BookCat]

Does this work with Windows 7? I've just downloaded it and tried to install, but it won't work. I see a black box with writing which just goes away. The program hasn't installed.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by BookCat

Does this work with Windows 7? I've just downloaded it and tried to install, but it won't work. I see a black box with writing which just goes away. The program hasn't installed.

Is there any reason you cannot upgrade to Windows 10? It would make your life so much easier.

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by BookCat

Does this work with Windows 7? I've just downloaded it and tried to install, but it won't work. I see a black box with writing which just goes away. The program hasn't installed.

Yes, it works, but it is a command-line app (which you can also use by dragging an EPUB over it). Alternatively, you can use the web version with a recent version of Chrome or Firefox.

[BookCat]

I've successfully created kepubs using the method of just dragging and dropping epubs over the Kepubify .exe Thanks.