Exporting

Everything runs in the browser tab. Your manuscript is never uploaded to be converted.

Destinations

The screen is a list of everywhere the book can go, in three groups: Print, Ebook and Other files. Tick the ones that apply. Each destination is checked against its own rules the moment the screen opens, ticked or not, and says so beside its name: Ready, 2 to fix or 1 to check. One button writes every ticked destination that is ready; one file is saved on its own, several arrive as a zip.

Group	Destinations
Print	Amazon KDP paperback, Amazon KDP hardcover, Lulu, B&N Press, PublishDrive, IngramSpark, Any printer, and the Print cover
Ebook	Amazon KDP Kindle, Lulu, B&N Press, Apple Books, Google Play Books, and Any store, or your own readers
Other files	PDF for a screen, Word document, Web page

A store’s destination writes the file that store asks for — IngramSpark’s as PDF/X-3, Kindle’s for Amazon’s converter with the body text at the reader’s size, Apple’s with the body at the reader’s size and your line spacing kept — and names the file after the store: book_kdp_paperback_print.pdf beside book_ingramspark_print.pdf.

Any printer and Any store are real answers. They check the book’s own facts and nothing else, for a printer with rules of its own or a file you send to your own readers.

Ebooks are written as EPUB only. MOBI is not offered: Amazon stopped accepting it for new books, and Send to Kindle takes an EPUB. See EPUB, MOBI, and the formats bookstores actually want.

The formats

Format	For	What it is
PDF	A printer	Fixed pages, embedded fonts, the trim and bleed the press asks for. What KDP, IngramSpark and Lulu take for a paperback
EPUB	Stores	A reflowable ebook — the reader chooses the type size. Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and every library system
DOCX	An editor	Word, with your styles mapped to Word styles so an editor can track changes. A handoff format, not a finished book
HTML	The web	The whole book as one page. For a sample chapter on your own site

Most books need two: a PDF for print and an EPUB for the ebook.

Two kinds of PDF

Every print destination writes a press PDF; PDF for a screen, under Other files, writes the other kind.

Destination	Result
A print destination	Chapters open on a right-hand page, with a blank leaf inserted to reach one — the bound book’s convention
PDF for a screen	No blank pages before chapters, and the same margin on both sides of every page: a screen has no spine

Send the press file to a printer, the screen file to a reader. They differ in the blank pages, in whether bleed is carried, and in the cover: the screen file opens on the ebook cover, as the EPUB does, while the press file carries none — a press takes the cover as a sheet of its own.

Press standard

Every print destination is written as PDF/X-1a, the press standard every printer accepts and the one KDP says it prefers. The line under Printed in says so, and says what it did to the colour:

Ink	What the file carries
Black	Every mark and every picture in grey, which is what a black-ink press prints
Standard or premium colour	Every fill and every picture converted to the press’s own inks (CMYK, against the GRACoL printing condition named in the file), with total ink held to the 240% IngramSpark asks for

You design in the colours you see on screen; the conversion happens in the file, once, and the press prints it as it is rather than converting it its own way. A picture that already carries CMYK is left alone. PDF for a screen stays an ordinary colour PDF.

The print cover

A press takes the cover as a file of its own, separate from the interior: one flat sheet carrying the back board, the spine and the front board, with bleed on all four sides. Print cover, under Print, writes it at the sheet the page count dictates, from the picture on the Details screen. Written in the same run as a print interior, it takes that interior’s page count, so the two files describe the same book. Change the page count and write the cover again; the spine is what moves.

The EPUB carries the ebook cover inside itself, and needs no second file.

The other reader-facing files use that same front-only ebook cover too: PDF for a screen and Word document open on it, and Web page places it before the book. They never reuse the print cover sheet, because its back board and spine are not pages a reader should meet inside the book.

What a store’s destination checks

Eleven store profiles are carried, each read from the store’s own pages on a stated date. A store’s destination checks the book against those rules as well as its own facts, sets the picture size limit its EPUB is resized to, and writes the file the way that store’s reader needs it.

Ink and paper

Under each print destination you ticked; a screen file keeps its colour, since a screen bills nothing per page. Each destination has its own settings, so the same book can go to KDP in black ink on cream and to IngramSpark in colour. This is a cost decision, not a design one — colour is billed on every copy sold, not once.

Printed in shows a price per page beside each option. Those figures come from Amazon KDP’s printing cost table for Amazon.com paperbacks, last verified against it on 7 August 2026:

Ink	KDP’s rate	A 300-page 6 × 9″ paperback
Black ink	$1.00 + $0.012 a page	$4.60 a copy
Standard colour	$1.00 + $0.0255 a page	$8.65 a copy — about 1.9×
Premium colour	$1.00 + $0.065 a page	$20.50 a copy — about 4.5×

IngramSpark’s rate card lands in the same band. The familiar “colour costs three to five times more” describes premium colour; standard colour is closer to twice.

Paper and binding

Paper lists the stocks the destination offers for the ink you chose — KDP’s white, cream and groundwood; IngramSpark’s and B&N Press’s by weight, White 50 lb and White 70 lb. The choice matters because the page ceiling is one cell of trim × ink × paper: KDP prints black ink to 828 pages on white and 776 on cream, and IngramSpark’s 50 lb white takes 1200 pages where its 70 lb white stops at 900. Where a store binds the same trim two ways with different ceilings, Binding asks which. A combination the store does not print is reported as such before the book is even paginated.

Choosing black ink flattens every colour in the book to its grey for that file only. The EPUB keeps its colour.

The screen

Destinations on the left, what each ticked one needs on the right, and the button under them. More options folds away two settings most exports never touch, shared by every file written: the pictures, and the advance reader copy.

Pictures

Pictures has two settings:

Setting	Result
Sized for each destination	Each picture is resized to what the file needs. Smaller file, same look. The default
As uploaded	Every picture exactly as you added it

A press file keeps each picture at print quality (300 dots per inch at the width it prints) and drops the rest. A screen file and an EPUB keep each picture at what a screen can show (2560 pixels on its long edge), or at the limit of the store you picked. WebP and AVIF become JPEG or PNG in every case.

Apple Books refuses a picture over 5.6 million pixels. Amazon charges a delivery fee on every sale, based on the file size. A photograph straight from a camera breaks both. See image size for an ebook.

The pictures in the book are never changed; only the file’s copies are. Pick As uploaded if you have already sized the pictures yourself.

Advance reader copies

Under More options, switch on Advance reader copy to write every PDF and EPUB in the run for reviewers and beta readers. The book is unchanged except for this:

• A page after the title page saying that this is an advance reader copy, not for sale.
• In the PDF, the same line in the margin of every page.
• The title becomes Title (Advance Reader Copy).
• No ISBN.

Prepared for adds the reviewer’s name to the notice. Expires adds a date after which the draft should not be quoted. The file is named with _arc. See advance reader copies.

Accessibility

Every EPUB carries the accessibility metadata stores and libraries read. Before it is written, the export check lists what only you can fix: a picture with no description, a heading that skips a level, a large table with no header row, a colour with too little contrast. The finished file is then checked against the rules Ace, the accessibility checker distributors use, runs on it. The result is shown under the file name.

When the file passes and every picture has a description, it declares conformance to EPUB Accessibility 1.1, WCAG 2.0 Level A. Otherwise it carries the metadata without the claim.

See the export check and making an ebook accessible.

While it writes

The button is replaced by a progress indicator showing the phase, the time elapsed, and which destination is being written. It can be cancelled.

A book of a few hundred pages takes seconds. War and Peace takes longer, and the indicator says where it is.

What you get

The file is saved wherever you choose. Your book is not uploaded and no copy of it is kept on a server — the studio reports only that an export happened, and which format it was, so we know which ones people actually use.

Under the file name, the notes: what could not be carried into the format, what was done to the pictures, whether the accessibility check passed, and whether the file is over the store’s size limit. File size is checked after writing, because it cannot be known before.