Who knows a quality/ reliable epub converter?

Rather than convert PDFs to epub which never works well in the best situations, why not just use Goodreader instead?

I'd second Tamara's suggestion - pdfs are difficult to convert accurately due to format and layout issues. To retain the full look and feel, including layout and any images, stick with pdf and get a pdf reader such as Good Reader - only 99c, and well worth it.

ON EDIT: I see your comment, but the problem is that however flexible epub file can be in theory, you are not goting to get that kind of result out of most conversions.

pdf format is itself designed to be the "end of the line". It is absolutely the worst thing to try to convert to any another format. I really doubt you will find anything that works the way you want.

Does anyone know where I can download one that really works. Even if it means a paid app, but preferrably allows me to evaluate before paying to know it really does work properly.

Have yet to see any "converters" that really work to my satisfaction -- free or commercial. There are however, other work flow possibilities. For instance, PDF files may be converted to HTML files which can then be opened in a free ePUB editing app like Sigli. This would not likely be an easy work flow, but it allows you to specifically format, image, and add metadata as desired. (I.e., basically, this app works like a text editor that outputs ePUB files.) It is a bit clumsy and somewhat limited but is free. At the other end of the scale would be inDesign CS5 which, as far as I know, still can't open PDFs directly but which I assume can still copy-import "text" content via the clipboard (e.g., copied word processor text, copied HTML text, etc.) in the same manner as Pages.

Hey there,

I found http://calibre-ebook.com/download to be very useful. It will convert most text files (including RTF, TXT, PDF and PDB) to ePUB. Thanks to this, I have all my lecture notes in iBooks - Which makes them a big more engaging when they're on the iPad 😀

Simply download the program, convert the files in question and import into iTunes and sync!

Hope this helps
G3R3N

Calibre is good but if you can wait for the OS update as the new update will let iBooks read PDFs.

I've have tried Calibre which seems to be the typical recommendation

The OP was looking for odditional options since Calibre doesn't do what they require.

Jason

As others have said, PDF is the worst format there is to try to convert to anything else. If you're willing to do some work, you'll get the highest-quality results by completely reformatting. You can export the original PDF as plain text or HTML with Acrobat Pro, though there are often problems with it. There is a free ebook creator called Book Designer (Google is your friend) that will import PDFs fairly well and then export in other formats. It's Russian (works in English, thoguh) only available for Windows, is quirky and difficult to learn, but does do a good job once you get the hang of it. Once you get the text out of the PDF, your best bet is to reformat it in InDesign and use InDesign's GREP function to clean it up. From there, you can export directly as ePub, but I've found InDesign's ePub files to be a little weak (iBooks is OK with most of them, but Stanza chokes on them and says they have DRM when they don't) and have started using Storyist (storyist.com) to apply styles and export. To do that, I export the cleaned-up and formatted file from InDesign as RTF and then import that file into Storyist. Unfortunately, InDesign doesn't export styles correctly and the current version of Storyist doesn't get the style names. However, there is a beta version that gets around the problem and I'm having very good luck with it. The Storyist ePubs are clean, acccurately formatted, and display perfectly in iBooks. Converting and producing high-quality eBooks is complicated at best.

Message was edited by: danegeld