📄 convert PDF to EPUB on Mac
macOS has no built-in way to convert a PDF to EPUB — Preview can open PDFs but cannot export to EPUB, and Books.app only reads EPUB, it doesn't create them. You can convert PDF to EPUB for free using OpenAny: upload your PDF, download the EPUB, no account needed.
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About .pdf to EPUB conversion
Why can't I just export to EPUB from Preview or Books on my Mac?
Preview is a PDF viewer and image editor; its export options are limited to PDF, TIFF, PNG, JPEG, and a few other image formats. Books.app can display EPUB files but has no conversion or export feature at all. Apple has never added EPUB export to either app, so you need a third-party tool for this.
How good is the EPUB that comes out of a PDF conversion?
It depends heavily on the source PDF. PDFs made from Word documents or other text-based sources convert well — text is extracted cleanly and reflows properly on e-readers. Scanned PDFs (essentially images inside a PDF) produce poor EPUBs because there is no real text to extract, just pictures of pages. If your PDF is scanned, you would need OCR software first, such as Adobe Acrobat or the free Tesseract, before converting.
Will my EPUB work on an iPhone or iPad after converting?
Yes. Once you have the EPUB file, you can add it to Books on iPhone or iPad by AirDropping the file to your device and tapping it, or by adding it to your Books library in Finder on your Mac and syncing. Third-party readers like Kindle or Kobo have their own format requirements, but standard EPUB works with Books natively on all Apple devices.