diff --git a/src/calibre/ebooks/html/output.py b/src/calibre/ebooks/html/output.py
index a36c808302..5c984162ac 100644
--- a/src/calibre/ebooks/html/output.py
+++ b/src/calibre/ebooks/html/output.py
@@ -151,6 +151,7 @@ class HTMLOutput(OutputFormatPlugin):
head_content = etree.tostring(head, pretty_print=True, encoding='utf-8')
head_content = re.sub(r'\<\/?head.*\>', '', head_content)
head_content = re.sub(re.compile(r'\', re.M|re.S), '', head_content)
+ head_content = re.sub(r'<(title)([^>]*)/>', r'<\1\2>', head_content)
# get & clean HTML -data
body = root.xpath('//h:body', namespaces={'h': 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'})[0]