EPUB vs PDF: Which Format Does Your Book Need?
Confused about EPUB and PDF? Learn the key differences, when to use each format, and which one is right for your book publishing goals.
Sooner or later every self-publishing author gets the same piece of advice: “just export it as a PDF.” It sounds sensible. A PDF looks exactly like your manuscript, it opens everywhere, and you already know how to make one. The trouble is that a PDF and an ebook are built for completely different jobs, and choosing the wrong one is one of the most common reasons a first book ends up looking amateur.
Here’s what actually separates the two formats, which one your book needs, and how most authors end up using both.
The short answer
If you want to sell an ebook on Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo or Google Play, you need an EPUB. If you want to print a paperback or hardcover, you need a PDF. For most novels and non-fiction books, the ebook comes first and the print edition follows.
| Format | Best for | What makes it different |
|---|---|---|
| EPUB | Ebooks on Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo and other stores | Text reflows to fit any screen and the reader’s settings |
| Print books and heavily designed layouts | Every page looks exactly as you designed it |
How an EPUB works
The easiest way to think of an EPUB is as a small website packaged into a single file. Inside are your chapters as web pages, a stylesheet describing how they should look, your images, and a table of contents. When someone opens the book, their reading app lays the text out to fit whatever screen they’re holding.
That’s what “reflowable” means, and it’s the reason ebooks are pleasant to read. A reader on a phone gets a narrow column that fits their screen; a reader on a tablet gets a wider one. They can make the text bigger on a tired evening, switch to a font they find easier, or turn on dark mode in bed, and the book simply adapts. Screen readers can read it aloud for visually impaired readers, the text is searchable, and the file is usually small, often a few megabytes even for a long novel.
The trade-off is control. Because the layout changes for every reader, you can’t promise that a particular sentence will sit at the top of a page or that two images will line up side by side. For a novel that doesn’t matter at all. For a cookbook with carefully composed spreads, it matters a great deal.
How a PDF works
A PDF is the opposite. It’s closer to a photograph of each finished page: the text, images and margins stay exactly where you put them, whatever device opens the file. Page 47 is page 47 everywhere, which is exactly what a printer needs and why print-on-demand services such as KDP Print and IngramSpark ask for a PDF interior.
That precision is wonderful on paper and awkward on a screen. On a phone, a PDF page shrinks to fit, so readers end up pinching and scrolling around a tiny page instead of reading. They can’t make the text larger without zooming the whole page, margins included. PDFs are also harder for screen readers to handle unless they’ve been carefully tagged for accessibility, and they’re usually much larger than the equivalent EPUB.
Side by side
| EPUB | ||
|---|---|---|
| Made for | Reading on screens | Printing and fixed layouts |
| Layout | Reflows to fit the screen | Fixed, identical everywhere |
| Reader controls | Text size, font, light or dark mode | Zoom only |
| Page numbers | Change with screen and text size | Fixed |
| Accessibility | Works well with screen readers | Harder unless carefully tagged |
| Typical size | A few MB | Often tens of MB with images |
| Where you upload it | Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Nook | KDP Print, IngramSpark and other printers |
Which one does your book need?
If your book is mostly text, such as a novel, a memoir, a self-help book or most business books, the ebook edition should be an EPUB. That covers the large majority of indie titles, and it’s the version most of your readers will meet first.
A PDF is the right choice when the page itself is part of the design: the interior of a paperback or hardcover, a photography or coffee table book, a workbook or planner, or a textbook with sidebars and diagrams that must sit in specific places. Picture books and comics are a special case. They’re usually published as fixed-layout ebooks, a variety of EPUB that behaves more like a PDF, and they need specialist tools.
Doing both
Most authors who sell well end up with both formats: an EPUB for the ebook stores and a PDF interior for print. They’re separate files made for separate jobs, so it’s normal to produce them separately, often in different tools.
The order matters, though. The ebook is quicker to publish, cheaper to fix, and usually where a new book’s first readers come from, so many authors launch the EPUB first and add print once the book has found an audience. When you do add print, you’ll need a print-ready PDF (KDP Print also accepts a Word document) made in a tool designed for print layout. One thing to be aware of: KDP Print doesn’t accept an EPUB for a paperback interior, despite what some guides claim, so plan on making that file separately.
A few myths worth clearing up
“Kindle uses PDF.” It doesn’t. Kindle books use Amazon’s own format, but KDP accepts EPUB uploads and converts them for you, and EPUB is one of the formats Amazon recommends for ebooks.
“I need a PDF to publish on KDP.” Only for the paperback or hardcover. The Kindle ebook should be an EPUB.
“PDF is higher quality.” For print, a well-made PDF is exactly what you want. For reading on a screen, an EPUB gives readers a far better experience, because it was designed for that job.
“EPUBs can’t have images.” They can. Covers, maps, illustrations and photos all work in an EPUB; they simply flow with the text instead of being pinned to a position on a page.
What’s inside an EPUB, if you’re curious
Under the hood, an EPUB is a ZIP archive with a .epub extension. Inside are your chapters as HTML pages, CSS files for the styling, any images, a metadata file describing the title, author and language, and a navigation document that powers the table of contents. The current version of the standard is EPUB 3.
Because EPUB is built on the same technology as the web, it’s well suited to being designed in a browser. That’s a big part of why Libba is a web app: it’s working in the same language the finished book is written in.
The bottom line
For most indie authors, the EPUB is the book. Get it right first, make sure it looks good on every device your readers use, and add a print PDF when you’re ready to sell paperbacks.
If you’re curious why Libba focuses only on the ebook side, I wrote about that decision in Why We Built Libba EPUB-Only. And if you’re ready to prepare your ebook for Amazon, How to Format an EPUB for Amazon KDP walks through the whole process step by step.
