Why We Built Libba EPUB-Only (And Why That's a Good Thing)
Most formatting tools try to do everything. We chose to focus on one thing: high-quality EPUBs. Here's why.
When I tell people Libba only makes EPUBs, I get one of two reactions. Some authors light up, because an ebook is all they were ever going to publish and they’re relieved to find a tool that doesn’t pretend otherwise. Everyone else asks the same question: but what about print?
It’s a fair question, and the honest answer says a lot about how Libba is built. This is the story of why I chose to do one thing well, and what that choice made possible.
The trouble with tools that do everything
Most book formatting software promises the whole package: ebooks, print PDFs, a writing environment, collaboration, sometimes even distribution. On a sales page that looks like great value. In practice, every one of those features competes for the same limited development time, and the result is usually a tool that does a little of everything and nothing especially well.
You feel it in small ways. The ebook export is fine until a scene break vanishes on one particular Kindle. The interface is crowded with print settings you’ll never touch. The price reflects features you don’t need. None of it is fatal, but it adds up to the feeling that the tool wasn’t really built for the book you’re making.
I wanted the opposite: a tool where every hour of work goes into the one file most indie authors actually depend on.
Why ebooks come first for most indie authors
For a lot of indie authors, and especially those early in their careers, the ebook is the book. It’s what goes live on Kindle, Apple Books and Kobo on launch day, it’s where the royalties are highest, and it’s the version readers can buy the moment they hear about you. You can publish an ebook today and fix a typo tomorrow. Print takes longer, costs more per copy, and every correction means a new proof.
That doesn’t make print unimportant. Plenty of authors sell paperbacks, and for some genres they matter a great deal. But the usual path is to launch digitally, find your readers, and add a print edition once there’s demand for it. If you could only perfect one format, the ebook is the one that pays you back first.
If you could only get one format exactly right, it would be the one your readers open on launch day.
What it actually takes to get an EPUB right
People tend to assume that an EPUB is easy and print is hard. In my experience it’s closer to the other way round. A PDF is a fixed picture of a page: what you see is what gets printed. An EPUB is a set of instructions that every reading app interprets in its own way, on screens ranging from a phone to a large tablet, with the reader free to change the font and text size whenever they like.
That’s where the real work is. The same file has to look right on a Kindle Paperwhite, an iPhone, an iPad and a Kobo, each with its own rendering engine and its own quirks. Scene breaks are a good example: many tools insert them as images, and images are exactly the kind of thing that can fail to load or collapse to nothing on certain devices. Character encoding is another. Get it wrong and your carefully chosen curly quotes turn into strings of garbage like “.
Then there are the retailers themselves. Stores don’t want your book pointing readers at their competitors, so a “buy my next book” link to Apple Books inside your Kindle edition can get it flagged, and the same goes the other way round. Most authors deal with this by keeping several copies of the same book and editing links by hand, which is exactly the kind of fiddly job where mistakes creep in.
None of these problems is glamorous, but each one is the difference between a book that looks professional everywhere and one that looks broken somewhere.
Where the time went instead
Saying no to PDF freed up time to solve those problems properly, and most of Libba’s distinctive features come directly from that decision.
Scene breaks are built from font-based ornaments, not images, so they don’t depend on an image loading on the reader’s device. There are more than 300 of them, grouped into 16 categories by genre, because a thriller and a romance shouldn’t have to share the same three asterisks.
Platform-specific exports deal with the store-link problem. You keep one project, and Libba produces a separate EPUB for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Nook and Google Play, each with only the links that retailer allows. No duplicate files, no hand-editing.
The live preview shows your book on simulated Kindle, Apple and phone screens as you work, including light, sepia and dark reading modes, so you can catch problems before you export rather than after a reader emails you about them.
And because so many authors arrive with books already formatted somewhere else, Libba imports existing EPUBs as well as Word and Markdown files. You can bring a backlist title in, update the back matter, and export it again without rebuilding it from scratch.
Just as important, Libba doesn’t ask you to buy anything new. It runs in the web browser you already have, on Windows, Mac, Linux, an iPad or your phone, and the interface was designed for each of those screens rather than squeezed onto them. You can format on your desktop in the evening and check a chapter on your phone on the train the next morning. That matters more than it sounds: Vellum, the tool most often recommended to indie authors, only runs on a Mac, which is how so many Windows authors end up buying a computer they didn’t need or settling for a tool they don’t like.
If I’d been splitting time between ebooks and print, I’m confident most of these would either not exist yet or would be a compromise that worked in both formats but excelled in neither.
”But I need print”
Then I’ll be straight with you: Libba isn’t a print tool, and it would be a disservice to pretend otherwise. If you need a paperback right now, you have a few good routes.
You can pair Libba with a dedicated print tool, using Libba for the ebook editions, where most of your updates will happen, and something like Atticus, Vellum or InDesign for the print interior. Each tool then does the job it was built for. You can hire a formatter for a one-off print interior, which often makes sense if the paperback is a secondary edition you won’t change often. Or, if print is central to your plans from day one, an all-in-one tool like Atticus ($147) or Vellum ($250, Mac only) may simply be a better fit, and that’s fine.
What I’d gently push back on is the idea that you need print before you’ve launched at all. For many authors, launching the ebook first, seeing how it sells, and adding print once readers ask for it is a calmer and cheaper way to publish.
Will Libba ever support PDF?
Maybe. It isn’t ruled out, but it isn’t next either. My priority is making the EPUB side as good as it can be: better typography, more templates, smoother importing. Print would only come later, and only if I could make it genuinely good instead of adding it so the feature list looks complete. That’s a long way off, and I’d rather say so plainly than promise something I can’t deliver.
The short version
EPUB-only isn’t a gap in Libba. It’s the reason Libba works the way it does. Focusing on one format is what made room for proper ornaments, per-store exports, a live device preview and EPUB import, in a tool that runs on any device with a browser, at $39 a year instead of $147 to $250 and without needing a Mac.
If you’re publishing digitally first, that focus is built for you. If print is essential right now, use a print tool alongside Libba, or choose an all-in-one tool, and come back when the ebook is the part you want to get exactly right.
If you’re still weighing the two formats, EPUB vs PDF: Which Format Does Your Book Need? walks through the differences in more detail. And if you’d like to try Libba when it launches, you can join the waitlist.
