BookConvert

Convert PDF books to clean Markdown files for use in Claude Projects, NotebookLM, and other LLM tools.

Handles both text-based PDFs (using Marker) and scanned/image-based PDFs (using OCR via Tesseract).

Setup

1. Install system dependencies (macOS)

brew install tesseract poppler ghostscript

2. Clone and set up Python environment

git clone https://github.com/AndySparks/BookConvert.git
cd BookConvert
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Convert a single PDF

python convert.py input/MyBook.pdf

Convert all PDFs in a directory

python convert.py input/

Convert a scanned/image-based PDF (OCR mode)

python convert.py input/ScannedBook.pdf --ocr

Specify output directory

python convert.py input/MyBook.pdf --output output/Philosophy/

How it works

1. Drop your PDF(s) into the input/ folder
2. Run convert.py — it uses Marker by default for text-based PDFs, which produces high-quality markdown
3. For scanned books (where the pages are images), use the --ocr flag — this uses Tesseract to extract text via OCR
4. Converted markdown appears in output/

Using with Claude Code

This project includes a CLAUDE.md file, so Claude Code understands the project and can help you convert and clean up books. Just open the project directory in Claude Code and ask it to help convert your PDFs.

Tips

• Start with the default mode (no --ocr flag). It's faster and produces better formatting for text-based PDFs.
• Use --ocr only if the default mode produces empty or garbled output — this usually means the PDF is scanned/image-based.
• OCR output may need cleanup. Claude Code can help you fix OCR artifacts, add proper headings, and improve formatting.
• Organize your output into subdirectories by topic (e.g., output/Coaching/, output/Writing/) to keep things tidy.

Project structure

BookConvert/
  input/          <- Drop your PDFs here
  output/         <- Converted markdown files appear here
  convert.py      <- Main conversion script
  requirements.txt
  CLAUDE.md       <- Instructions for Claude Code

License

MIT