FB2 to EPUB Converter turns a FictionBook (.fb2) ebook into a standard EPUB 3 file that opens in almost every reading app and device. Drop in an .fb2 file or an .fb2.zip archive and the EPUB is ready to download a moment later. The converter keeps the structure of the book: parts and chapters become a clickable table of contents, the cover from the FB2 description becomes the EPUB cover, embedded images stay in place, and footnotes are collected into a Notes chapter, and each note number in the text links to its note. Poems keep their stanzas and line breaks, epigraphs and citations stay set apart, and the title, authors, language, series with its number, publisher, ISBN and genres are copied into the EPUB metadata, with FB2 genre codes such as sf_fantasy turned into readable names. Older Russian FB2 files saved in windows-1251 or KOI8-R are decoded from the encoding they declare, so Cyrillic text comes out correctly instead of as question marks. Everything runs inside your browser: the book is never uploaded. To read the book straight away use FB2 Reader, for a printable copy use FB2 to PDF Converter, and to change the title or cover of the finished EPUB open it in EPUB Metadata Editor.
FictionBook was created in Russia in the early 2000s for online libraries, and FB2 is still the most common ebook format on Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian sites. Instead of describing how a page looks, an FB2 file describes what each part of the book is. A body element holds the text, nested section elements hold parts and chapters, each with an optional title and epigraph, and poems are written as stanzas of separate verse lines. Footnotes live in a second body named notes and are linked from the text by id. Pictures are not separate files at all: each one is stored as base64 text in a binary element at the end of the document, and the cover is just a reference to one of those binaries from the book description. Because of that design an FB2 book is a single file that is easy to index and convert, but few readers outside Eastern Europe understand it. Converting to EPUB means mapping every FB2 element to XHTML: sections become chapters, titles become headings, verse lines are joined with line breaks, base64 images are decoded back into real image files, and the notes body becomes a chapter whose ids are linked from the text. Metadata from the title-info and publish-info blocks goes into the EPUB package file. One FB2 feature has no direct EPUB counterpart: translators. EPUB metadata has no separate field for them, so the converter adds a Translated by line to the book description instead of dropping the names.