Bookdrop 2.5.1

Fixed

• Quitting Bookdrop while it converted a book to PDF left the PDF renderer (a hidden Chromium) running in the background, using about 75 MB of memory until you restarted your Mac. Quit now stops the conversion first and waits for the renderer to close.
• If Bookdrop crashed or was force-quit during a PDF conversion, the next launch now closes the renderer it left behind.

Install

1. Download Bookdrop.dmg below. Open it and drag Bookdrop to Applications.
2. Open it once and close the warning (it is not notarized). Then open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Requires macOS 13 or later. Universal app: Apple Silicon and Intel. The Intel build is lightly tested; please open an issue if it fails on your Intel Mac.

Bookdrop 2.5

New look

Bookdrop now looks and works like a standard Mac app.

• Book screen: the options are in grouped sections, like System Settings, with every row aligned. The book's cover, author and details are at the top, and "EPUB → PDF" is shown next to Convert. Press Return to convert.
• Window: one title bar, with Back and Settings in the toolbar. File › Open… (⌘O) opens books from any screen.
• Settings: a real Settings window (⌘,) with General, Conversion and Advanced tabs.
• Recent conversions: file icons, dates such as "2 days ago", and Open and Show in Finder when you point at a row. Double-click opens the file. Files that were moved or deleted are marked. Clearing the list now asks first.
• "A file with this name already exists": a standard alert with Keep Both, Replace and Cancel.
• Converting, done and error screens: simpler, with the progress shown once, the file's own icon when it is done, and the problem stated first when something fails.
• Batch conversion: you can now choose the folder to save to, and each book shows its progress, a check mark, or what went wrong.
• Plainer option names, for example "Book title at the top of each page".

Fixed

• With a long list of recent conversions, the top of the window (including Settings) was pushed out of view.

Install

1. Download Bookdrop.dmg below. Open it and drag Bookdrop to Applications.
2. Open it once and close the warning (it is not notarized). Then open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Requires macOS 13 or later. Universal app: Apple Silicon and Intel. The Intel build is lightly tested; please open an issue if it fails on your Intel Mac.

Bookdrop 2.4

New

• Markdown output. Convert any book to a .md file. The book's images go into a folder next to it (Book.md and Book_images/), with normal links, so the images show in any Markdown app. Headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes, code blocks, bold and italic are kept. "Include cover" adds the cover at the top.

Changed

• If a folder with the images folder's name is already there without its Markdown file, Bookdrop never replaces it. It saves the new book as "Book (1).md" instead.
• Replacing a Markdown file also replaces its images folder, so no old images stay behind.

Known limits of Markdown output

• Links in the book become plain text.
• Numbered lists become bulleted lists, and nested lists become one level.
• There is no generated table of contents.

Install

1. Download Bookdrop.dmg below. Open it and drag Bookdrop to Applications.
2. Open it once and close the warning (it is not notarized). Then open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Requires macOS 13 or later. Universal app: Apple Silicon and Intel. The Intel build is lightly tested; please open an issue if it fails on your Intel Mac.

Bookdrop 2.3.1

Fixed

• PDF conversion no longer fails for a book that has # or ? in a chapter's file name. Before, the whole conversion stopped with a "blocked" error. Links to such a chapter also work in the PDF.

Install

1. Download Bookdrop.dmg below. Open it and drag Bookdrop to Applications.
2. Open it once and close the warning (it is not notarized). Then open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Requires macOS 13 or later. Universal app: Apple Silicon and Intel. The Intel build is lightly tested; please open an issue if it fails on your Intel Mac.

Bookdrop 2.3

Fixed

• Batch conversion now follows the "After conversion" settings. You get one notification for the whole batch, and "Reveal in Finder" opens one Finder window with all the converted files. A batch does not open each file.
• Word output no longer shows a "Generate table of contents" option. Word output has no table of contents, so the option did nothing.
• HTML output reports an error if a chapter of the book is missing, instead of leaving the chapter out without a message.
• Removed the "No effect yet" note under "Remember last output format". The setting works.

Changed

• PDF conversion no longer changes the book's files while it renders, so the same book can be converted more than once at the same time.
• The list of files Bookdrop opens, and the options shown for each output format, now come from the conversion engine, so the two can no longer disagree.
• The engine refuses option names it does not know, so a wrong name fails a test instead of being ignored.
• Internal cleanup: shared helpers, one shared conversion flow, and smaller source files. No change to conversion results.

Install

1. Download Bookdrop.dmg below. Open it and drag Bookdrop to Applications.
2. Open it once and close the warning (it is not notarized). Then open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Requires macOS 13 or later. Universal app: Apple Silicon and Intel. The Intel build is lightly tested; please open an issue if it fails on your Intel Mac.

Bookdrop 2.2

Security

• Opening a crafted book can no longer write files outside Bookdrop's temp folder.
• A crafted book can no longer copy other files from your Mac into the converted output.
• PDF conversion renders books with scripts off, the browser sandbox on, and no network access. A book can load only its own files.
• HTML output blocks scripts and remote content from the book.

Fixed

• PDF bookmarks open the right chapter. Before, every chapter in one file opened that file's first page.
• PDF bookmarks work for books whose table of contents is in a subfolder.
• Books with spaces or other encoded characters in file names convert.
• Accented titles show correctly in PDF metadata, headers and footers.
• The cover in Word output fits the page.
• A failed or cancelled conversion no longer leaves a broken file, or deletes the file it was to replace.
• Temporary files are deleted when a book is closed. "Clear Temporary Files" keeps the book that is open.
• Batch conversion: a failed book no longer stays "converting", and Cancel All stops the book that is converting.
• Error messages name the real problem (password-protected PDF, DRM, scanned PDF) and tell you what to do.
• The notification names the real output format.

Changed

• Books open in the background, so the app stays responsive with large PDFs and Kindle files.
• Each book is read once, not twice, for the preview and the conversion.
• "Remember last output format" works.
• Removed two settings that did nothing: "Start chapters on new page" and "Open Logs Folder".
• PDF output is about 10 to 20% slower because of the new security checks.

Install

1. Download Bookdrop.dmg below. Open it and drag Bookdrop to Applications.
2. Open it once and close the warning (it is not notarized). Then open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Requires macOS 13 or later. Universal app: Apple Silicon and Intel. The Intel build is lightly tested; please open an issue if it fails on your Intel Mac.

Bookdrop 2.1

New

• Kindle books: AZW3, AZW, KFX and MOBI open directly.
• PDF as an input: Bookdrop reads PDFs with a text layer and rebuilds the chapters. It refuses scanned, two-column and locked PDFs with a clear message.
• EPUB as an output.
• Every format now runs on the Rust engine.
• Universal app: Apple Silicon and Intel. The Intel build is lightly tested; please open an issue if it fails on your Intel Mac.

Fixed

• PDF input: lost spaces in headings, and glyphs in the wrong order.
• The release build finds the universal binary on Xcode 27.

Install

1. Download Bookdrop.dmg below. Open it and drag Bookdrop to Applications.
2. Open it once and close the warning (it is not notarized). Then open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Requires macOS 13 or later.

Bookdrop 2.0.0

PDF conversion now runs on anyform, a Rust engine that renders through
a bundled, self-contained headless Chromium build (via the DevTools
Protocol) instead of the previous Swift-native WKWebView pipeline —
the same class of approach calibre's PDF output uses. TXT/HTML/DOCX
conversion remain Swift-native for now.

What's new

• Full PDFOptions support on the new engine — page size/margins/
  orientation, typography, headers/footers/page numbers, cover and
  table-of-contents toggles all reach the renderer
• Default PDF typography now matches calibre's own defaults (1in margins,
  15pt base font) for a comparable page count/density out of the box
• Async, cancellable conversion with live progress through the Rust/FFI
  boundary

Install: download Bookdrop-2.0.dmg below, drag Bookdrop into
Applications, then right-click → Open on first launch (unsigned build —
see the README for why). Apple Silicon only in this build.