FB2 to Text & Word extracts the text of a FictionBook ebook so you can edit, quote, translate or analyze it. Drop in an .fb2 file or an .fb2.zip archive and choose the output: plain text (.txt) that opens anywhere, Markdown (.md) that keeps headings, lists and quotes in a readable form, or a Word document (.docx) with real headings, paragraphs and, if you like, the images from the book. You can pick exactly which chapters to include, add chapter titles, preview the result, copy it to the clipboard, or download it. Poems keep their line breaks, footnotes come along in a Notes chapter you can leave out, and the word count of the selection is shown as you go. Text in windows-1251 and KOI8-R is decoded correctly, and the output is always UTF-8, so Cyrillic text stays readable in any editor. Nothing is uploaded: the book is processed in your browser. For a print-ready copy use FB2 to PDF Converter, to read it use FB2 Reader, and to count pages of the result try Words to Pages Converter.
Getting clean text out of an FB2 book is harder than it looks, even though the format is XML. Opening the file in a text editor shows the markup, a description block full of metadata, and sometimes megabytes of base64 image data at the end, and older files are often not UTF-8 at all. A proper export has to walk the document structure instead: take the sections in reading order, turn titles into headings, join the paragraphs, keep the verse lines of poems on separate lines, and skip the binary image data. Plain text is the most portable result and suits search, translation tools and text analysis. Markdown keeps a little more structure, with headings marked by hash signs and quotes by a leading angle bracket, which makes it a good starting point for editing a book in a writing app or publishing it on the web. A Word document is the right choice when the text needs to be edited, commented or formatted by someone used to office software, because chapter titles become real Word headings that appear in the navigation pane. Footnotes need a decision of their own. FB2 keeps them in a separate notes body rather than inside the text, so this tool exports them as their own chapter. That keeps the main text clean, and you can leave the notes out with one click.