EPUB to Jupyter Notebook Converter

Convert EPUB files into Jupyter notebooks for use with solve.it.com.

Inspired by karpathy/reader3 for EPUB parsing.

Features

• Extracts chapters from EPUB files
• Creates one Jupyter notebook per chapter
• Converts HTML content to Markdown
• Generates index notebook with table of contents
• Works with or without optional dependencies (graceful fallback)

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

Or install dependencies directly:

pip install ebooklib beautifulsoup4 lxml

Usage

Basic usage

python epub_to_notebook.py book.epub

This creates a book_notebooks/ directory with:

• 00_index.ipynb - Table of contents
• chapter_00_*.ipynb - Individual chapter notebooks

Specify output directory

python epub_to_notebook.py book.epub -o my_notebooks

Output as plain text instead of Markdown

python epub_to_notebook.py book.epub --format text

List chapters without converting

python epub_to_notebook.py book.epub --list-chapters

Output Format

Each chapter notebook contains:

1. A title cell with chapter name, book title, and author
2. A content cell with the chapter text in Markdown format

The notebooks are compatible with Jupyter and can be used with solve.it.com for interactive reading and analysis.

Dependencies

• ebooklib - EPUB parsing (optional, has fallback)
• beautifulsoup4 - HTML processing (optional, has fallback)
• lxml - XML/HTML parser for BeautifulSoup

The converter works without these dependencies using built-in Python libraries, but the output quality is better with them installed.