Kindle and ebook converter: AZW, AZW3, MOBI, EPUB and CBZ to PDF or EPUB
Ebooks come in a tangle of formats — Amazon's AZW and AZW3, the older MOBI, the open EPUB, and CBZ/CBR for comics. This page converts between all of them, and explains the one case where no converter can help.
The formats, briefly
EPUB is the open standard every non-Kindle reader uses. MOBI is the original Kindle format; AZW is Amazon's wrapper around it; AZW3 (KF8) is the modern Kindle format with proper CSS. CBZ and CBR are simply zip and rar archives of page images, used for comics and manga.
PDF is the odd one out: it fixes the layout to a page size, which is what you want for printing or reading on a laptop and what you do not want on a small e-ink screen.
DRM: the honest answer
Books bought from the Kindle store are DRM-protected and will not convert — the file opens as garbage, or the conversion fails. This is true of every converter, and removing DRM is not something we do. Books you sideloaded, bought DRM-free (Humble Bundle, Tor, Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg), or wrote yourself convert without issue.
If a conversion fails on a Kindle file, DRM is almost always the reason.
Choosing the target
Reading on a Kobo, Boox or phone app: choose EPUB. Sending to a Kindle: AZW3 (or EPUB via Send to Kindle, which converts on Amazon's side). Printing, annotating on a laptop, or archiving a fixed layout: PDF. Editing the text: DOCX. Feeding a book to an AI assistant or note-taking app: Markdown keeps the structure and drops the formatting.
Comics (CBZ/CBR) to PDF keeps each page at full resolution; the result is often large, so run it through the compress tool if you need to email it.
Ebook and comic conversions
Related tools
How to do it
- 1Upload the book
Drag your .azw3, .mobi, .epub or .cbz file onto the converter. Several at once is fine.
- 2Pick the target
EPUB for readers, PDF for print, DOCX to edit, Markdown for notes.
- 3Download
The converted book is ready in seconds. It is deleted from our servers within 24 hours.
Frequently asked questions
Why did my Kindle book fail to convert?
It is DRM-protected. Amazon-purchased books cannot be converted by any tool without first removing the DRM, which we do not do. DRM-free books convert normally.
Will the table of contents survive?
Yes for EPUB, AZW3 and MOBI targets — Calibre rebuilds the navigation. PDF gets bookmarks where the source had chapter markers.
Which is better for Kindle, MOBI or AZW3?
AZW3. It supports modern CSS, embedded fonts and better tables. MOBI is only needed for Kindles made before 2011.
Can I convert a PDF into an EPUB?
Not here. PDF to reflowable EPUB is unreliable in every tool because PDF has no notion of paragraphs; results are usually poor. We offer PDF to DOCX and Markdown instead, which extract the text cleanly.