Book Outline Extractor

The Book Outline Extractor pulls the table of contents and chapter hierarchy out of an EPUB and hands it back as structured text. That is genuinely useful when you need the skeleton of a book without the prose: drafting a study guide or chapter-by-chapter summary, building a reading plan or course syllabus around an assigned text, or sanity-checking that chapters are ordered and named correctly before you submit a manuscript or send it to a reviewer.

Because the output is also available as CSV and JSON, it fits data-prep and tooling workflows too. The CSV (with level, title, and href columns) drops into a spreadsheet or imports as tasks into a project tool, where each chapter becomes a row to track. The JSON keeps the nested parent-child structure intact, so developers and writers building scripts, static sites, or documentation pipelines can consume the outline programmatically rather than retyping it by hand.

For authors and publishers, the extractor is a quick structural audit: confirm that your nav and chapter labels read the way a reader will see them, and that nothing is mislabeled or out of sequence before the file goes out.

The flow is short. Drop or select an EPUB, the tool reads its table of contents in your browser, and you get a live nested preview plus three counts: total TOC entries, top-level chapters, and the book title pulled from metadata. You then pick a format and download, or copy the result. Everything runs locally; nothing is uploaded, and nothing persists once you close the tab.

Outline data is read from the EPUB's own navigation. The extractor first looks for the EPUB 3 nav document (the toc nav), and if that is absent it falls back to the older NCX navMap used by EPUB 2 files. Four export shapes are supported: indented plain TXT, Markdown with heading levels, flat CSV, and nested JSON that preserves the full hierarchy including each entry's href.

What it does not do: it does not convert, edit, or rebuild the EPUB, and it does not extract body text, word counts, or images — it reports the structure the book already declares. Input is EPUB only; PDF, MOBI, and other formats are out of scope.

The biggest limitation is that the outline is only as good as the EPUB's own table of contents. If a file ships with no nav.xhtml and no toc.ncx, the tool reports that no table of contents was found and produces nothing meaningful — despite some files reading fine in an e-reader, which may build a TOC differently. It does not currently reconstruct an outline by scanning the spine or chapter heading tags, so a book whose navigation is empty or broken will come back empty here.

DRM-protected EPUBs cannot be read at all; the tool detects encryption and stops rather than returning a partial result. Quality issues in the source carry straight through too: if chapter titles in the nav are generic (Chapter 1, Untitled, or a filename), that is exactly what you will get back, because the extractor reports labels rather than inventing better ones.

A common mistake is judging completeness by the on-screen preview alone. The counts reflect the declared TOC depth, which may be shallower or deeper than the book's real chapter structure — some publishers list only part-level entries, others nest every subheading.

Open the downloaded file and compare it against the book itself. Confirm the chapter count and order match the actual reading sequence, that nesting depth looks right (top-level chapters versus subsections), and that titles are real names rather than placeholders or filenames. If you exported CSV or JSON, spot-check that the level values and href links line up with the entries you expect, since those drive any spreadsheet or script that consumes them.

Watch for front and back matter — cover, copyright, acknowledgments, and index pages often appear as TOC entries and may need trimming depending on your purpose. If the title field shows a dash or the wrong name, the EPUB metadata is the cause, not the outline parsing.

For any official, academic, financial, or legal use — a syllabus of record, a citation, a submission checklist, or a contract reference — verify the extracted structure manually against the source book. This tool reports what the EPUB declares, which can differ from the printed or canonical edition, so it should support your review rather than replace it.