A browser cannot read another website

Every other converter on this site runs entirely inside your browser, and we say so loudly because it is unusual. This one cannot, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

A web page you did not visit is, from your browser's point of view, off limits. It refuses to fetch it, for the same security reason it refuses to let one open tab read another. So when you paste a URL, our server fetches that page, pulls the article out of it, and sends back the text and a list of the images.

What happens after that is the same as everywhere else here. The images are fetched, the chapters are assembled, the EPUB is zipped up in this tab, and no part of the finished book is ever stored by us. We fetch the page. We do not keep the book.

What survives the extraction

A modern article page is mostly not the article. There is a header, a navigation bar, a sticky subscribe prompt, a sidebar of popular posts, a share rail, a related-posts row, a comment thread and a footer of legal links. The words you actually came for are a minority of the page.

The extractor scores every block of the page on how much prose it contains and how much of that prose is wrapped in links, because a paragraph is mostly text and a navigation menu is mostly links. The winning block is the article. What comes across is headings, paragraphs, lists, block quotes, tables and images. What does not is everything above.

Paywalled and members-only posts will not work. The page is fetched the way a search engine sees it, so if a logged-out visitor cannot read it, neither can this.

Reading it later, on something that is not a screen full of adverts

The simplest use is the oldest one. You find six long articles you do not have time for. You paste the URLs, download an EPUB, and read them on an e-reader on a train with no signal, at a font size you chose, with nothing blinking at you.

Because each URL becomes a chapter, a series that was published across six weeks reads as one thing, in order, the way it should have been published.

From a plain ebook to one you would put your name on

If you are a blogger, the reason to do this is different. Years of posts on one theme are already a book, badly organised. Gathering them into an EPUB is the first step and takes about a minute.

What comes out is structurally correct and visually plain. There is no cover, no chapter opener, no pull quote, no considered typography. It is your writing in a container. Turning that into something you would offer as a lead magnet or sell is a design job, not a conversion job.