Conversion of PDF Books in ePub Format

In the last years the interest in e-book readers is significantly growing. Two main document formats are supported by most devices: PDF and ePub. The PDF format is widely used to share documents allowing a cross-platform readability. However, it is not ideal for a comfortable reading on small screens. On the opposite, the ePub format is re-flowable and it is well suited for e-book readers. In this paper we describe a system for the conversion of PDF books to the ePub format aiming at inverting the text formatting made during the pagination. To this purpose, layout analysis techniques are performed to identify the book's table of contents and the main functional regions such as chapters, paragraphs, and notes.