Do Those Auto-Magic Conversion Websites Work?

Yes, we know that you’ve probably seen Internet websites and ads on Google saying “Convert your PDF to Word Now!” or other such promises.  Mostly, this is snake-oil.  We have been doing this for four years, and we have never found an “easy" way to convert PDF's to HTML to make an eBook.  We’ve never even found a good way to make a clean Word file from PDF, at least, not with "push-button magic." 

We get a lot of Word files in here for quoting that were obviously made from PDF's using these snake-oil conversion sites or worse, software you have to buy.  Please don't fall for this.  When we look at the “underneath” in these files, it's harder to clean and more time-consuming than just making the book from the PDF file you had.  Unless you have a lot of expert knowledge of Word, please don’t try to use these converters and then send us the resulting Word file.  When you think of the results of these "auto-magic" conversions, what you see as a result is not what you get; you see a tiny piece of the surface, like an iceberg.  The submerged part, however--the part that actually makes your eBook--is a disaster.  You can read a bit about this in our article, Why PDF's Really Don't Work At Kindle. 

What we do to convert PDF to Word/HTML is very time-consuming and takes a lot of knowledge, to do correctly.  We don't say this to fool you.  We say this to save you money and time.  The files made by these “EZ convert" programs are quite simply no good, and are worthless for conversion.  You're better off simply giving us the PDF, and allowing us to work from that, for accuracy of conversion.