eBook Conversion Service

Epubmatic has been providing prepress and ebook conversion services to publishers since 2011, so we can confidently say that we know books. The majority of these conversions are to reflowable EPUB 2, the format supported by the widest range of ebook retailers and devices, with onward conversion of the EPUB and PDF to mobi format for Amazon and the Kindle. But recently we’ve also seen, and met growing demand for conversion to other industry standards – enhanced fixed-layout EPUB 3 and KF8, accessible EPUB 3, accessible and enhanced PDFs – and to proprietary formats such as iBooks Author.

Our conversion clients include publishers of all sizes across strands and disciplines, content aggregators, and corporations with legacy content to distribute internally. These titles include novels, academic and professional books, complex textbooks, highly designed trade titles, comics, training manuals, and annual reports. We work extensively in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. Our workflow incorporates a high level of intelligent automation to ensure the accuracy of our ebook conversion services, which sets us apart from other conversion suppliers.

In a fast-moving market for competing ebook readers and apps, it’s our job to stay on top of the latest changes to ensure that your converted content works across platforms. Because we work directly with retailers and distributors, we know how to tweak our conversions and provide elegant fallbacks for a range of target devices, and our quality assurance includes testing ebooks on those devices.

Input formats

We typically work from text or image PDFs or printed books for reflowable ebook conversion, and application files or print PDFs for fixed layout. But we won’t baulk at any input format: we regularly handle InDesign, Quark, FrameMaker, and 3B2/APP application files; Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Open Office, and RTF wordprocessing files; HTML and live Web content; and microform material. Whatever the input format, we’ll optimise the conversion and QA process to produce the best possible output.

Reflowable ebooks (EPUB 2, EPUB 3, .mobi)

Even after introduction of the EPUB 3 specification, EPUB 2 remains the most common format for ebook conversion because of its broad support across retailers, distributors, and devices. But not all EPUB files are created equal. We pay attention to the details that ensure the best reading experience.

■■ Our ebook converter tools prevent the errors that ebook buyers frequently flag in their online reviews, such as two words joined together, or one word still divided by an end-of-line hyphen; broken paragraphs; question marks and boxes in place of accented letters and symbol characters; lost text formatting, and no table formatting
 
■■ Our reflowable ebook conversion services are device optimised to ensure a consistent reading experience across ebook readers and apps
 
■■  We also optimise images for legibility, and file size for speedy downloads
 
■■ We keep format and styling separate from content to allow global changes to the design of the ebook, independent of the original print design
 
■■ We hyperlink internal and external cross-references, including indexes (to physical page or a specific point in the text), notes (bidirectionally, so that readers can follow the cue and still come back to the text), figure and table citations, and URLs that point to a valid Web page
 
■■ And if you need EPUB 3, we can produce EPUB 3 files that fall back to EPUB 2 on devices and reading systems that don’t yet fully support the updated version of the EPUB specification

Fixed-layout ebooks
 
(EPUB 3, KF8, NOOK ePub and PagePerfect)