How on planet Earth can I change this pdf to epub? I tried everything I could think of in Calibre but the problem is that the pdf has 2 columns of text per page, plus footnotes on each page. When it converts to epub it just prints each line of each text column as a line of text, which makes it totally lose it’s meaning. Footnotes are also just added as regular text, as part of a supremely incoherent story with aggressive punctuation.
Has anybody been able to solve this before?
ePUB is basically zipped HTML, so while it’s easy to convert from, it’s hard to convert to. You might just want to try to find your book in an alternative format from somewhere like Annas Archive. I think azw3 and mobi’s can be converted to ePUB easier.
Really the only good way is to manually recreate the book, there’s no good automatic pdf to epub converter. You might be able to hire a guy on fiverr or such to do it for you, that’s the closest I can think of to automatic.