Guides › Create an EPUB
How to create an EPUB from a Word file
By Lukas · updated
An ebook for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo or tolino almost always starts as an EPUB. You can make one from a Word manuscript for free, with several tools, but how good it turns out depends less on the tool than on the Word file. This guide covers what the file needs for any converter, the free ways to convert it, how to check the result, and what KDP and tolino accept. What it says about the tools and stores comes from their makers’ own pages, as of 30 October 2026.
1. What an EPUB does differently from Word
An EPUB is, at heart, a small website in a ZIP file: the text in HTML, the look in CSS, plus the images, a table of contents and the book’s details. An ordinary EPUB has no fixed pages. The text reflows whenever the reader changes the font, the size or the screen. So everything in Word that belongs to the page is gone: page numbers, headers and footers, margins, a paragraph that sits exactly at the top of a page. What remains is the structure: which paragraph is a heading, which a quotation, where a chapter starts, where a footnote belongs. That is what a converter reads from the Word file.
2. Prepare the Word file
These points hold for every tool in step 3, including a store’s own conversion. A converter sees only what is in the styles and the structure of the file, not what it looks like on screen. So the main thing is the same as for a printed book: every chapter title in Heading 1, body text in a style, no spacing or indents by hand, no text boxes, no typed table of contents. How to do that, and which styles there are, is in the guide to preparing your manuscript in Word, with a free template. An EPUB adds these points:
- Pictures “in line with text”. A picture that floats on the page or has text wrapped around it often ends up in the wrong place in the EPUB. Put it in a paragraph of its own, as a JPEG or PNG, and give it alt text (from the picture’s context menu). Screen readers and read-aloud read it in place of the picture.
- Footnotes with Word’s footnote feature. References › Insert Footnote, not a superscript number with text at the bottom of the page. Only real footnotes become linked notes.
- Page numbers, headers and footers go. An EPUB has no fixed pages, and its table of contents comes from the headings.
- Curly quotes. What is in the file is in the EPUB. The tool that fixes quotation marks and dashes turns straight quotes and hyphens used as dashes into the right characters.
- Keep tables small. A wide table is hard to read on a phone. According to Amazon, Kindle doesn’t show tables with more than 1,800 cells or 20,000 characters at all.
3. The free ways
| Tool | Runs on | Makes from .docx |
|---|---|---|
| Calibre | Windows, macOS, Linux | EPUB (and many other formats) |
| WordToEPUB (DAISY) | Windows | EPUB, with accessibility in mind |
| Kindle Create (Amazon) | Windows, macOS | KPF for KDP, and EPUB for reflowable books |
| The store itself | in the browser | KDP and tolino media take .docx and convert it themselves |
Calibre
Calibre is a free, open-source ebook manager for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its manual says it converts .docx files from Word 2007 and newer directly: add the file, choose Convert books, pick EPUB as the output format. Calibre builds the table of contents from the headings if they use the Heading 1, Heading 2 and so on styles. A large picture at the start of the file becomes the cover. The EPUB output options let you choose the EPUB version. The manual advises EPUB 2 unless you need EPUB 3; tolino media asks for EPUB 3 when you upload an EPUB (step 5). Save an old .doc file as .docx in Word or LibreOffice first.
WordToEPUB from DAISY
The DAISY Consortium, which works on accessible reading, gives WordToEPUB away for free, for Windows 7 to 11. It adds a button to Word’s ribbon and can also be started by right-clicking a .docx file in Explorer. Its focus is an EPUB that also reads well with a screen reader; DAISY mentions that Word’s Accessibility Checker can be run first. The page names no Mac version. The current version is 1.0.11, from July 2023.
Kindle Create
Amazon’s Kindle Create runs on Windows and macOS and reads DOC, DOCX and PDF. A Word file becomes a reflowable ebook, a PDF a page replica (Print Replica). It saves as KPF, Amazon’s own package format. KPF is not an EPUB: KDP says the file is only for publishing, and no other store or reader opens it. For reflowable books Kindle Create can export an EPUB as well; for uploading to KDP, Amazon recommends the KPF. According to Amazon, some design is lost on the way, such as images in the bleed, drop caps over more than three lines and chapter start images.
The store converts it
If you publish with one store only, you may not need a converter at all. KDP takes Word files for Kindle ebooks directly and says most of them convert well. tolino media takes .docx and .odt and makes an EPUB from them itself, which you can download, check and edit. The rules from step 2 apply there just the same.
4. Check the EPUB
Technically: EPUBCheck. EPUBCheck is the validator for EPUB files, maintained by the DAISY Consortium on behalf of the W3C; the current version is 5.4.0. It runs with Java on the command line: java -jar epubcheck.jar book.epub. If it reports errors (ERROR), stores may reject the file; at least read the warnings. If you’d rather avoid the command line, pagina’s EPUB-Checker, which tolino media recommends, puts a window around the same check.
By eye: in a reader. EPUBCheck doesn’t tell you whether the book looks right. Open it in at least one reader and page through it:
- Thorium Reader, free for Windows, macOS and Linux, reads EPUB 2 and 3.
- Kindle Previewer, free from Amazon for Windows and macOS, shows how the book will look on Kindle devices. KDP recommends checking an EPUB with it before you upload.
- A real device or a reading app on your phone: that is where oversized pictures, hard spacing and tables running off the edge show up.
Look at the table of contents (every chapter there, no empty entries), the chapter openings, the footnotes (does the link go there and back?), the pictures, special characters, and whether the text size can change in the reader without anything falling apart.
5. What KDP and tolino accept
Amazon KDP lists Word (DOC/DOCX), KPF from Kindle Create, EPUB and MOBI as the usual formats for Kindle ebooks, plus HTML, RTF, TXT and, for some languages, PDF. Since March 2025 KDP no longer accepts MOBI for fixed-layout ebooks. An EPUB has to meet the Kindle Publishing Guidelines; KDP recommends checking it in Kindle Previewer first. You upload the cover separately on KDP. If the EPUB has a cover page of its own as well, Amazon says the cover may show twice.
tolino media, the self-publishing service behind tolino and German stores such as Thalia and Hugendubel, takes EPUB 3, .docx or .odt as the content file, up to 100 MB, but no PDF. After the upload it shows the results of a validation. The cover comes separately as a JPG in RGB, portrait, at least 1,600 pixels wide and at most 5 MB. Publishing an ebook with tolino media costs nothing.
6. When a free tool is enough
For a novel with chapters, a few footnotes and a handful of pictures, a free tool is often all you need, as long as the Word file is clean (step 2). If you publish only with Amazon, the Word file straight into KDP or Kindle Create is the shortest way. If you publish only with tolino, it’s tolino media’s conversion. If you need one EPUB for several stores, Calibre is the simplest general route; if accessibility matters to you and you’re on Windows, WordToEPUB.
It gets tedious when the ebook and the printed book have to match: the same chapter openings, the same quotation marks, the same front matter, and every correction made in both files. With free tools you then keep two editions apart, and every change to the manuscript means making and checking both again.
7. What Kernsetzer does for the EPUB
Kernsetzer reads the same Word or Markdown file it sets the print PDF from and writes the EPUB 3 from it too. What it does:
- One file per chapter, a contents page in the book and one for the reader’s navigation, with up to two levels (parts and chapters), and the book’s details: title, subtitle, author, language and the ebook ISBN if you have one.
- The title page comes from the metadata instead of a recreated Word page, and so does the copyright page if the manuscript has none.
- Word footnotes become notes at the end of the chapter, linked both ways.
- The same curly quotes, dashes and spaces as in print, and for German books »guillemets« if the book is set with them.
- Pictures sized relative to the screen, with the alt text from Word.
- A stylesheet with no fixed font sizes and no colours, so the reader decides the font, the size and night mode.
- An option at export, “for Kindle”, that leaves out the EPUB’s own cover page, because Amazon adds the cover itself.
- A check before export that reports, among other things, a cover that is too small. The project’s test books have to pass EPUBCheck with no errors and no warnings in the automatic checks.
What it doesn’t do: tables from Word or Markdown arrive as plain paragraphs for now, one paragraph per table row. Text boxes, embedded objects and pictures in EMF, WMF, TIFF or BMP are left out with a warning. It doesn’t design the cover; a finished cover goes into the EPUB as it is. Kernsetzer is still being built, and the public beta starts in mid-November 2026. Sign up for the beta.
Sources, read on 30 October 2026: the Calibre manual on conversion and the ebook-convert options (manual for Calibre 9.17), DAISY’s page on WordToEPUB, KDP’s help on supported ebook formats, getting started with Kindle Create, preparing reflowable and print books in Kindle Create and Kindle Previewer, tolino media’s pages publishing an ebook and the ebook FAQ (in German), the EPUBCheck project and EDRLab’s page on Thorium Reader. What it says about Kernsetzer comes from its source code. Tools and stores change; check the current rules before you upload.