Get in Touch

Print-to-Ebook Conversion, Done Properly

Converting a printed book into a Kindle-ready ebook is not an export step. The print file’s typesetting decisions — fixed page sizes, justified columns tuned to a specific measure, drop caps tied to a baseline grid, hand-kerned headings — break the moment a Kindle Paperwhite or an iPad Mini reflows the text at 1.4× the line spacing the reader prefers. A correct conversion rebuilds the book around the new constraint: text that has to look intentional at 12pt on a 6″ e-ink screen and at 24pt on a phone in landscape, on a device the author has never held.

Reflowable vs Fixed-Layout — Pick Once, Before Formatting Starts

Reflowable EPUB3 is the right answer for novels, memoirs, business books, devotionals, study guides, and anything where the reader controls font size. The text flows; chapter breaks, drop caps, and pull quotes are rebuilt as semantic styles instead of frozen layouts. File size stays small (1–5MB). Reader-app accessibility features — text-to-speech, dyslexic-friendly font, high-contrast mode — keep working because the text is real text, not an image.

Fixed-layout (FXL) is correct for cookbooks with full-bleed photo spreads, illustrated children’s books with art-and-text composition, comics, art books, and anything where the page is the design. The page renders as a unit on every device. Trade-off: file size grows 5–20×, reader font controls are disabled, and the book looks small on a 6″ Paperwhite. We push back when authors ask for fixed-layout on text-heavy books — the format costs them more in file weight and accessibility than it saves in visual control.

The Kindle Build Process Is Not “Word → Upload”

Amazon’s KDP accepts .docx, but the .docx route runs through an automated converter that strips advanced typography, breaks nested lists past two levels, and occasionally drops embedded fonts entirely. The result is technically a Kindle book; it is not a finished one.

The route we use:

1. Manuscript is rebuilt in InDesign or as a hand-authored EPUB3 with a clean stylesheet — no inline overrides, no orphaned spans, no Word-paste residue.
2. EPUB3 is validated with EPUBCheck. Schema errors get fixed at the source, not patched in the upload.
3. The EPUB is rendered through Kindle Previewer 3 to produce a KFX/KPF preview that matches what Amazon ships to readers — current Paperwhite, older Kindles, iOS Kindle app, and Fire tablets each render differently, and Previewer 3 is the only way to see all of them.
4. Final QA on three physical devices: an older e-ink Kindle, a current generation e-ink, and a colour tablet. Most “my Kindle book looks broken” tickets trace back to skipping this step.

What’s Included in a Print-to-Ebook Job

Manuscript cleanup, semantic restyling (H1/H2/H3, lists, blockquotes, captions, footnotes), TOC rebuild with linked anchors, image re-export at the right pixel density (300 PPI for fixed-layout artwork, 96–150 PPI optimised for reflowable), cover sized to the current KDP spec (2560×1600 minimum, 1.6:1 ratio), metadata, and a validated EPUB3 plus the converted KFX. We hand back the source files when the job is done — you own them, and you can re-publish anywhere without coming back to us.

If you need both a Kindle file and a print interior, the Book-to-eBook & Print package handles both from a single manuscript pass so the two editions stay in sync.