EPUB to XTC, and why you may not need it
This conversion has a twist worth knowing before you go looking for a tool: an Xteink reader already opens EPUB. The X3 user guide lists TXT in UTF-8 and EPUB as its supported book formats, so if you have an EPUB and an Xteink, the honest answer is that you can read it as it is. We would rather say that on the page you landed on than pretend you need a conversion you do not.
The conversion is also the awkward one of the pair, for a structural reason. An EPUB is reflowable: it describes content and lets the device decide where lines break and pages end. An XTC file is the opposite, a stack of bitmaps rendered in advance at one fixed size. Going from the first to the second means committing to a layout and then freezing it, so everything the EPUB left flexible gets decided for you at conversion time. For a manga EPUB of full page images that is harmless. For a text heavy one it is a real loss, because the reader can no longer change the font size.
EPUB to XTC is coming soon
Not live yet, and often not needed: Xteink lists EPUB as a supported book format. Resize the EPUB for the panel instead.
Vote for this on the roadmapWhat to do with an EPUB and an Xteink
Try reading it as EPUB first
Copy the EPUB to the device and open it. Xteink documents EPUB support for books, so for most files this is the whole task. If it reads well, you are done and no conversion is needed.
If the pages do not fit, resize rather than reformat
An EPUB of full page manga images can come out too large or too small for a 3.7 or 4.3 inch panel. Upload it here, choose Custom conversion, and enter a size near 480 by 800. You get an EPUB whose pages are built for that screen, which solves the fit without giving up reflow.
Keep the text reflowable if it is a novel
If the EPUB is mostly prose, converting to a fixed bitmap format is a downgrade: you lose font size control permanently. Leave it as EPUB. The light novel handling here is for sizing images around text, not for flattening text into pictures.
Vote if you specifically need XTC
There are real reasons to want the native format, mainly load speed on very small hardware. The roadmap vote and the traffic to this page are how that gets weighed against everything else waiting to be built.
The most useful answer is sometimes do nothing
An Xteink opens EPUB. If you arrived here looking for a converter, the thing you probably needed was that sentence. The resizing route is here for the case where the pages do not fit the panel, which is a different problem from the format being wrong.
Fixed layout is a one way door
Worth stating because it is easy to miss: once pages are rasterised into XTC, no reader can change the font, the margins or the page size. That is fine for comics and costly for text. Choose the format for what is inside the file rather than for the device alone.
Frequently asked questions
Can I convert an EPUB to XTC here right now?
No. Our outputs are EPUB, MOBI, CBZ and PDF. This page explains the conversion and tells you what to do instead, which for this pairing is usually nothing at all, because the device reads EPUB.
If the Xteink reads EPUB, why would anyone want XTC?
Speed and battery, mostly. An XTC page is already rendered, so the device does almost no work to show it, which matters on hardware this small. The trade is that the file is locked to one screen size and one bit depth forever.
What is the hard part of converting EPUB to XTC?
Deciding the layout. An EPUB does not have fixed pages; it has content that becomes pages when a device lays it out. An XTC file is nothing but fixed pages. So the converter has to pick a font size, a margin and a page break scheme, render the result, and discard the flexibility. Any two tools making those choices differently would produce different files from the same EPUB.
Will I lose anything converting a manga EPUB this way?
Less than you would with a novel. A manga EPUB is usually one full page image per page, so there is no reflow to lose and the only real change is the drop to one or two bit greyscale. A prose EPUB loses font size control, which most readers notice immediately.
Is CBZ a better starting point than EPUB for XTC?
Yes, if you have the choice. A CBZ is already a set of page images, so nothing has to be interpreted before rasterising, and the one open source XTC converter that exists takes CBZ rather than EPUB for exactly that reason.
When will EPUB to XTC be available?
We are not giving a date. XTC output exists upstream as an open, unmerged pull request against the conversion engine, and emitting the format here would need a rendering stage our pipeline does not have. The page is honest about that rather than optimistic.
MangaConverter runs on Kindle Comic Converter (KCC), the open source engine, which emits EPUB, MOBI, CBZ and PDF. XTC output exists upstream only as an open pull request, so EPUB to XTC is a planned addition here rather than a live conversion, and this page will host it once it genuinely works.