About doc2epub

An opinionated book typesetter — not a file converter.

What doc2epub is

Plenty of tools will convert a Word document into an EPUB. doc2epub does something narrower and harder: it typesets your manuscript the way a book designer would, and hands you two finished interiors — an EPUB for ebook stores and a print-ready PDF for paperback printers. It makes the hundreds of small decisions that separate a document from a book, so you don’t have to learn them.

Who it’s for

Self-publishing novelists who want their paperback to look like it came from a publisher. Poets whose line breaks and stanzas must survive the trip to an e-reader. Nonfiction authors with tables, charts, code samples and endnotes that a generic converter would mangle. If you have a finished manuscript and no desire to learn InDesign, this is for you.

The craft

The details are the product: drop caps that sit correctly on the opening line, running heads with your title and author across each spread, folios where a printer expects them, mirrored margins with the gutter widened by the arithmetic Amazon KDP publishes for your page count. Every EPUB is checked with epubcheck — the same validator the retailers run — before you ever download it.

Why we built it

Authors were finishing books and then stalling at the last step — formatting — where the choices were paying a service hundreds of dollars per book, learning professional layout software, or shipping something that looked homemade. Typesetting a manuscript is exacting but mostly mechanical, which makes it exactly the kind of work software should do. So we taught it the rules and made it fast enough to watch.

Contact

A real person reads support@doc2epub.com — questions, bug reports and wishes are all welcome. There’s more on the contact page.