FB2 (FictionBook) is an XML-based e-book format designed for fictional literature. It supports metadata, styles, and images, making it suitable for storing and reading fiction e-books.
Common Uses
Fiction books
Russian eBooks
XML-based reading
FB2 Conversion FAQ
What is an FB2 file?
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FB2 (FictionBook) is an XML-based eBook format popular in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Why does the same FB2 book look different on two devices?
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Because it is meant to. An FB2 is a package of structured text and styling that the reader lays out at your chosen font and size, so page count and line breaks are properties of the device, not of the book. Converting to a fixed-layout format freezes one particular rendering — good for printing, worse for reading on a phone. FB2 is FictionBook, an XML ebook format created in Russia around 2004 and still dominant in Russian-language libraries.
Who uses FB2 in practice?
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Digital libraries and archives, largely — the format is XML-based, so a book in it is structured data rather than a rendering, and it can be validated, indexed and transformed programmatically. That is a serious advantage for a collection and irrelevant to a single reader, whose device probably wants something more common. FB2’s single-file XML structure is trivially machine-readable and carries far richer bibliographic metadata than EPUB.
Does the table of contents survive converting an FB2?
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Yes, wherever the target has somewhere to put it. Ebook formats store navigation as real structure — a list of chapter anchors that the reader turns into a jump menu — and that is carried between them. A fixed-layout export turns it into bookmarks instead, and a plain-text export loses it along with everything else structural. Chapter breaks themselves survive all three.
What if my FB2 is a scan rather than real text?
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Then nothing downstream can read it until OCR has run. A scanned page is a picture of words: it looks fine, and searching, copying or converting to an editable document all come back empty. Optical character recognition adds a real text layer over the image, after which the words are selectable and the conversion produces an actual document instead of a wrapper around a photograph.
Is the cover image kept when I convert an FB2?
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It is, provided the book records one as the cover rather than merely having a picture on its first page. That distinction is why a converted book sometimes shows a blank placeholder in a library: the image is still inside the file, but nothing marks it as the cover, so the reader app displays nothing. It is metadata rather than content, and it can be set afterwards without touching the text.
Does an FB2 have fixed pages?
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No — content flows, and pages appear only when something decides on a page size. Change the font, the margins or the screen and the page numbering changes with it. That is why a page reference from an FB2 is unreliable, and why converting to a fixed-layout format is the step that makes page numbers mean something.
Who controls the FB2 format?
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Nobody, and that is the point of it. The specification is public, anyone may implement it without asking or paying, and no company can change the terms later — which is why archives, standards bodies and public institutions specify formats like this one for anything that still has to open in twenty years. The trade is not compatibility, which is excellent; it is that there is no vendor to call when some tool implements the spec badly.
Can I convert a whole folder of FB2 files in one go?
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With an account, yes — drop them in together and they are queued as one job rather than handled one at a time, with the same settings applied across the batch and the results returned together. Free conversions run a single file at a time (merge tools take two); a paid plan is what unlocks batch processing and the larger per-file limit, which is what makes converting a whole archive practical.
What happens to my FB2 file after the conversion?
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It is deleted. The upload and the converted result both sit on the server only as long as the job needs them and are then removed automatically; the transfer runs over HTTPS in both directions. Nobody reads the contents, nothing is indexed, and nothing is passed to anyone else. If you would rather not wait for the automatic sweep, closing the job removes the files immediately.
How long does converting an FB2 take?
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Usually seconds. Small files are effectively instant, and the cases that take real time are the ones doing real work: a long recording that has to be re-encoded frame by frame, a scanned document going through character recognition, or a very large batch. Where a conversion only rewraps or repackages the existing data it stays fast no matter how big the file is, because nothing is being decoded.
Do I need an account to convert an FB2?
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No. Drop the file in, pick the output format, and download the result — no signup, no email, no watermark on what comes back. An account exists for the things that need one: a bigger per-file limit, converting several files at once instead of one at a time, and a history of your recent jobs.
