Some books cannot reflow. A picture book, a cookbook spread, a comic panel and a photograph all mean something because of where they sit on the page. Fixed layout locks that arrangement in place across every device, and it is the only correct answer for an illustrated book. It is also the format most suppliers get wrong.
A fixed layout EPUB is a pre-paginated book. Every page has declared dimensions, every element has a position, and none of it moves when the reader changes their font or turns their tablet. The page you designed is the page they receive, which is exactly the point when the artwork and the words are doing one job together.
That sounds like a PDF and it is not. A fixed layout EPUB is still a web page underneath, which is what makes region magnification, tap-to-zoom, guided panel navigation, audio narration and text selection possible at all. A PDF is a photograph of a page. This is a page that can respond.
The craft is in the constraints. Every device has a different aspect ratio, and your spread has exactly one. Deciding what happens in the letterbox space, how a two-page spread behaves on a phone held upright, and where magnification regions belong is the entire job, and it cannot be automated.
The complaint every fixed layout author eventually receives is that the book is too small to read on a phone. That is not an inevitable flaw in the format. It is the result of nobody deciding what should happen when a 10-inch spread is rendered on a 6-inch screen held vertically.
There are answers. Region magnification lets a reader tap a block of text and have it fill the screen. Guided view walks a comic reader panel by panel. Synthetic spreads can be split. Landscape can be encouraged. What you cannot do is build the file, ignore the small-screen case, and be surprised when the reviews mention it.
Tappable zones over text blocks, speech bubbles or recipe method, so a reader on a phone gets legible type without pinching and dragging.
Panel-by-panel navigation for comics and graphic novels, following the reading order you specify rather than the one an algorithm guesses.
A deliberate answer for portrait, landscape and the synthetic-spread question, written into the file rather than left to the device.
Six things that come with every illustrated book we build, whatever it is and wherever it is going.
Every page is declared with fixed dimensions and a viewport, and every element is positioned against it. Text stays where you put it relative to the artwork, at the size you chose, on a phone, a tablet and a desktop screen alike. The composition you approved is the composition that ships, which is the entire reason you chose this format.
Tappable magnification zones over the text, the speech bubbles, the recipe method or the caption, so a reader on a small screen gets legible type without pinching. This is the single feature that decides whether your fixed layout book is usable on a phone, and it is the one most often omitted entirely.
Comics and graphic novels get panel-by-panel navigation with the reading order defined by you rather than inferred by software. Left to itself, an algorithm will read a splash page in the wrong sequence and reveal the reaction shot before the punch. Panel regions are marked by hand.
Artwork is the file, so the file gets heavy fast. Every image is resized to the largest dimension a device will actually render, compressed to the point just before you can see it, and checked on both backlit and e-ink screens. The book stays beautiful and stops being expensive to deliver.
Amazon wants a Kindle fixed layout package with its own quirks. Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play want EPUB 3 fixed layout with correct pre-paginated metadata. They are not the same file and they are not interchangeable. We build both from one design so the book is consistent everywhere it lands.
A fixed layout book is the hardest thing to make accessible, and that is a reason to try harder rather than to give up. Real text over the artwork wherever possible, a defined reading order, alt text that describes meaning rather than filename, and a page nobody has flattened into an unreadable picture.
Six illustrated books, six sets of constraints. A cookbook and a comic break in entirely different places. Open any of them to see the decision behind the page.
Both are fixed layout. They diverge on features, on metadata and on what the reader can do with the page, and the difference is not cosmetic.
Amazon's own fixed layout container. It supports region magnification and panel view, it handles two-page spreads on Fire tablets well, and it is the file that goes to KDP. Text can be real text over the art, and it should be.
It is also less capable than the open standard in places, particularly around audio, interactivity and some of the finer typographic control. It goes to Amazon and nowhere else, so it cannot be your only file.
The open pre-paginated standard, and the file Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play want. It carries the richer feature set: read-aloud media overlays, sharper typographic control, proper spread metadata and better accessibility support.
It also validates strictly. Apple in particular rejects things Amazon shrugs at, which is the moment most authors discover their fixed layout book was never built to the specification at all.
Six failures we find in almost every illustrated file that arrives here as a rescue job.
Every element, how it is constructed, and what it protects on the page.
| Element | How we build it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Viewport declaration | Fixed pixel dimensions declared per page, matched to the artwork | Without it, a reading system falls back to reflow and your composition disintegrates on the first screen. |
| Pre-paginated metadata | rendition:layout set at package level, overridden per page where needed | This single property is what tells the device the pages must not move. Its absence is the most common fatal error. |
| Text over artwork | Real, selectable text positioned above the image, never baked in | Selectable text can be magnified, searched, read aloud and enlarged. Flattened text is a picture of words. |
| Region magnification | Tap zones defined over each text or panel area | It is the only thing standing between your illustrated book and a one-star review about phone legibility. |
| Panel regions | Guided view order defined manually per page | A comic read out of order is not a comic. The software cannot see what happens next; the person who drew it can. |
| Spread behaviour | Facing pages and synthetic spreads declared explicitly | Decides what happens when a tablet is turned sideways, rather than leaving the device to improvise. |
| Image encoding | Resized to rendered maximum, recompressed, colour-checked | Illustrated books hit file-size ceilings and delivery fees faster than anything else in publishing. |
| Accessibility layer | Reading order, alt text and language declared throughout | A locked page still has to be navigable by a screen reader, and a child's book is often read aloud by an adult who needs the text to exist. |
Fixed layout fails on the devices nobody checks. So those are the ones we check first.
The hardest case in the format, and the one that generates the complaints. A landscape spread on a vertical phone screen is either a design decision you made or an accident you shipped. We open every page there, tap every magnification zone, and read the book on the worst possible screen for it.
Where illustrated books are actually read, and where the spread question gets settled. Facing pages, single pages, portrait and landscape, and the exact moment a two-page composition either holds together or breaks apart down the gutter.
Every guided view sequence is stepped through in order, on device. A panel out of sequence is a story told wrongly, and it is invisible in any preview that shows you the whole page at once.
Every region is tapped. Does it open, does it contain what it should, is the text legible at the size it lands, and does it close again. A magnification zone that opens on the wrong block is worse than none at all.
The Kindle fixed layout path has its own behaviours and its own failures, especially around spreads and image scaling. Previewer shows some of them. The device shows the rest, and only one of those two is the truth.
Amazon, Apple and Kobo each check different things and enforce them differently. Apple is the strictest and rejects most readily. We validate against all of them before delivery rather than finding out from a rejection email.
Illustrated books produce more files than prose books do. Here is every one of them.
Built for KDP, with region magnification working, spreads declared, and the image set weighed and optimised. Previewed on our side before it reaches you, because a fixed layout file that fails at upload wastes a launch date rather than an afternoon.
Validated pre-paginated EPUB 3 for Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play. This is the richer file, the one that supports read-aloud and the fuller accessibility layer, and the one the strictest stores will accept without argument.
Every illustration at its rendered dimensions, compressed and colour-checked, delivered as files as well as embedded. Useful for your website, your promotion and the next edition, and a great deal easier than digging them back out of the book.
What the book weighs, how that compares to the ceilings each store enforces, and what the per-sale delivery cost works out at. Illustrated books are the only kind where this genuinely changes the economics, and almost nobody reports it.
Unpacked markup, stylesheets, positioning and image assets. A fixed layout book is a large amount of hand-built code, and it is yours. Without it, the next edition means starting again from the artwork.
What was decided on each spread and why: where the magnification zones went, how the panels were ordered, what happens in portrait. When you come back for book two, nobody has to reverse-engineer book one.
Five stages. The first one is a conversation about your artwork, and it saves more money than anything downstream.
We look at what you have: resolution, bleed, layers, whether text is separate from the art, and whether the spreads were designed as spreads. This determines everything.
Before a page is built, we settle what happens on a phone. Magnification, guided view, orientation, synthetic spreads. This is a design choice and you make it with us.
Each page is built with a declared viewport, positioned text over the artwork, and magnification zones marked by hand rather than generated.
Phone, tablet, Kindle hardware, both orientations, every zone tapped and every panel sequence walked. Then validation for all three stores.
Files, artwork, source, the build note and the weight report, followed by two rounds of changes.
Fixed layout is quoted per page, since a single page is the unit of labour here. Every page is composed, positioned, magnified and tested individually, and a 32-page picture book of 400 words is not a small job just because the word count is.
Required steps are marked with *. Optional extras can be removed from the summary with the cross icon.
Different illustrated books need different features. This decides which ones get built.
Count every page that has artwork on it, including spreads, endpapers and the title page.
Which stores you are selling through. Amazon and Apple want genuinely different files.
How much has to happen on each page beyond placing the artwork.
How many separate image assets there are, which is not always the same as the page count.
Your window is calculated from everything above and shown live as you build.
Two are included. Illustrated books usually need them, because artwork changes.
Illustration, artwork creation, editing, cover design, ISBNs and narration recording are not included. We build the book from the artwork and text you supply. We do not draw, write or record it.
Design software will export a fixed layout EPUB in one click. What comes out is a demonstration of the format, not a book.
| What you are comparing | Export / Auto-Build | Book Formatting Experts |
|---|---|---|
| Text on the page | ✕ Flattened into the artwork, so nothing can be selected, searched or magnified. | ✓ Real text positioned over the image, selectable and enlargeable everywhere it appears. |
| Phones | ✕ Unreadable, and treated as an unavoidable limitation of the format. | ✓ Magnification zones over every text region, tested on a phone held upright. |
| Comics | ✕ Panel order guessed by software, with reveals arriving before setups. | ✓ Guided view marked by hand, page by page, in the order the artist drew it. |
| File weight | ✕ Print artwork dropped in whole, straight past the store ceilings. | ✓ Every asset resized and recompressed, with the weight and delivery cost reported to you. |
| Apple Books | ✕ Rejected, because Apple actually enforces the specification. | ✓ Validated for each store separately before delivery, Apple included. |
| Accessibility | ✕ A locked page of pictures, invisible to a screen reader. | ✓ Declared reading order, real text and alt text that describes meaning. |
Fixed layout is one format serving six very different books. The constraints are not remotely the same.
Two lines of text over a full-bleed illustration, read by an adult on a tablet with a child on their lap, at bedtime, usually in a hurry. The text must never drift from its picture, the file must open quickly, and read-aloud is worth more here than any other feature in the format.
The ingredients and the method have to be visible together, because a recipe split across a screen boundary cannot be cooked from. The photography sells the book and inflates the file. Magnification over the method is what makes it usable on a phone propped against a mixing bowl.
Panel order is narrative. Guided view has to follow the artist's intent, not a left-to-right assumption that fails on the first splash page. Speech balloons need individual magnification, and the double-page reveal has to survive being rendered on a device that only wants to show one page.
Colour fidelity against file size, and the two are in direct conflict. A photograph compressed carelessly is an insult to the photographer, and an uncompressed one is a book too heavy to sell. The work is finding the exact point where the eye stops noticing.
Diagrams, labelled illustrations, activity pages and callouts, all of which need magnification and none of which reflow. Often bought by schools and libraries, which means accessibility and metadata get inspected far more carefully than they do on a retail listing.
Where the arrangement of the words on the page is part of the poem, and reflow would destroy the meaning as surely as rewriting the lines would. Fixed layout is chosen here not for the pictures but for the shape of the text itself.
A word-count price makes no sense for an illustrated book. A 32-page picture book might contain 400 words, and it will take longer to build properly than a 60,000-word novel. Words are not what consumes the time here. Pages are.
Every single page in a fixed layout book is composed individually: a viewport declared, artwork placed, text positioned over it, magnification zones drawn, panel order set, and then the whole thing opened on a phone to see whether any of it survived. That happens per page, so the price is per page.
Every text block is placed against the artwork by hand and then checked at three aspect ratios. There is no style sheet that does this for you.
Each zone is drawn, targeted, tapped and adjusted. On a busy comic page that can be fifteen separate regions on one spread.
Illustrated books push against real file-size ceilings, so compression is tuned image by image rather than applied as a batch setting.
Nothing ships until every line here is ticked, page by page.
Six situations that bring illustrated authors here, usually after trying something else first.
You have the illustrations, you have four hundred words, and every eBook formatter you have spoken to has quoted you as though it were a novella. It is not a novella, and it is not cheaper than one. It is thirty-two individually composed pages, and it should be priced and built as such.
The book is beautiful on an iPad and unusable on the device most of your readers own. This is not a flaw in fixed layout. It is a missing feature, it is called region magnification, and it can be added to a book that already exists.
The panels are all there and the sequence is wrong, because guided view was left to software that cannot see the story. Every panel region has to be marked by a person who knows what happens next.
Amazon took it and Apple did not, and the rejection notice was not written for humans. Apple actually enforces the fixed layout specification, which means your file has a genuine structural fault that Amazon simply chose to overlook.
Full-resolution artwork pushed the book past a store ceiling, or the delivery deduction has become visible on every sale. Both are fixable without visibly degrading a single image, and the difference is usually dramatic.
The cookbook or the art book exists in print, the InDesign file exists somewhere, and there is no digital edition because nobody could tell you how to make one that worked. This is exactly what fixed layout is for.
Three commitments, and one thing we will not do quietly.
Every fixed layout file we deliver is validated against the strictest store, not the most forgiving one. If Apple Books rejects a file we built, the fix is ours, it is free, and it does not consume a revision round. Passing only at Amazon is not passing.
Magnification zones are built into every text-bearing page as standard, not offered as an upsell after the reviews arrive. If your book cannot be read on the device most of your readers hold, we have not finished it, whatever it looks like on a tablet.
Not every illustrated book needs fixed layout. A lightly illustrated memoir or a novel with a few maps is usually better served reflowable, and we will say so and quote you for the cheaper service. Selling you a locked page you did not need would be an easy way to take more money and a bad way to keep a client.
Three principles that decide every fixed layout judgement call.
If it works on a phone held upright, it works everywhere. Building for the iPad and hoping is how illustrated books earn their reputation for being unreadable.
The moment text becomes part of the image, it stops being text. It cannot be magnified, selected, searched or read aloud, and the book becomes a slideshow.
In an illustrated book, file size is not a technical footnote. It decides what artwork can survive, and pretending otherwise just moves the problem to the store's rejection notice.
The whole page, compressed.
Artwork, panels, spreads and typographic shape justify it. A novel with three maps in it does not.
Magnification, guided view, orientation. Answer it deliberately at the start, or answer it in the reviews later.
Everything good about fixed layout EPUB over a PDF depends on this one decision, and it is the one most often thrown away.
Rated 4.9 out of 5 across 149 reviewed projects.
I had already paid someone else to format this book once. The chapter headings shifted every time a reader changed the font size and I only found out from a review. This team rebuilt the interior from the structure up and sent me photographs from four real devices before I uploaded anything. First launch day I have not spent refreshing the reviews in a panic.
What sold me was the audit. They came back and told me two chapters had been pasted in from another document and were carrying invisible styles, and that fixing that first would save me money later. Nobody had mentioned it in three years of self-publishing. The proof needed no corrections at all.
My book has footnotes, tables and two appendices, and every quote I got either ignored that or doubled the price because of it. Here the pricing was laid out step by step and I could see what each element cost before I committed. It arrived early and the notes link both ways, which nobody else had even offered.
The proof came back from the printer with the margins exactly where they should be, the running heads correct, and not one chapter opening on a left-hand page. This is my fourth book and the first time I have not had to pay for a second proof copy.
English is my second language and I was nervous about the back and forth. Everything was explained plainly, and when I asked the same question twice they answered as if it were the first time. The revisions were turned round inside two days and I was never made to feel like a nuisance.
I write cookbooks, so the interior is the product. Ingredients have to sit beside the method or the recipe stops working, and the last person I hired reflowed the whole thing into nonsense. These people understood the problem before I had finished describing it and the finished layout is genuinely beautiful.
Straightforward from beginning to end. A fixed price, a delivery window they actually hit, and files that went up to KDP and IngramSpark without a single rejection. I have since sent them two more titles and recommended them to my writing group without hesitation.
My memoir has photographs and I had resigned myself to them looking muddy. They optimised every image, told me honestly which two were too low-resolution to save, and suggested crops instead of shrugging. That candour is worth more to me than the discount I was chasing elsewhere.
I sent them a 480-page reference book with a nightmare of cross-references and a table on nearly every spread. They quoted it accurately, they did not come back later asking for more money, and the index still works. Any author will tell you what that is worth.
The questions authors actually ask us, answered without sales language.
It is the construction of a pre-paginated eBook, where every page has declared dimensions and every element has a position that does not move. The reader cannot change the font or the arrangement, because the arrangement is the book. It is the correct format for picture books, cookbooks, comics, photo books and art books, and the wrong one for almost everything else.
A PDF is a fixed image of a page. A fixed layout EPUB is a fixed web page, which is a fundamentally different thing underneath. That difference is what makes region magnification, guided panel navigation, synchronised read-aloud narration, text selection and screen-reader access possible. A PDF can do none of that. It also sells poorly on eBook stores, which mostly do not want one.
Because the page is the unit of work and the word count is irrelevant. A picture book might have four hundred words spread across thirty-two pages, each one composed by hand, positioned, given magnification zones and tested at three aspect ratios. Charging by word count would price that as a pamphlet. It is not a pamphlet, and any supplier quoting it as one has not built one.
If the words sit on the artwork, yes. The moment text reflows away from the illustration it describes, a picture book stops functioning, and for a child that is not a small inconvenience, it is a broken book. If the illustrations are occasional plates between chapters of prose, then no, and reflowable will serve your readers far better.
It is a tappable zone over a block of text or a panel, which enlarges that region to fill the screen when a reader taps it. It is the single feature that makes a fixed layout book usable on a phone, and it is the one most commonly left out. Without it, your reader is pinching and dragging around a page designed for a screen four times the size of theirs.
Guided view walks a reader through a comic panel by panel rather than showing the whole page at once. On a phone it is not a luxury, it is the only way the book can be read. It has to be marked by hand, in the order the artist intended, because software reads a page geometrically and a comic is not laid out geometrically.
KF8 is Amazon's fixed layout container, and it is what KDP takes. EPUB 3 fixed layout is the open pre-paginated standard, and it is what Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play take. They support different features, declare their metadata differently, and are not interchangeable files. If you want to sell in more than one store, you need both, and they should be built from one design rather than converted from one another.
It will be if somebody decided that it should be. Region magnification, considered orientation handling and sensible type sizing make a fixed layout book perfectly usable on a small screen. The books that earn the complaints are the ones where nobody made that decision at all, and the device was left to do whatever it does when a landscape spread meets a vertical screen.
Yes, provided it was kept as real text over the artwork rather than flattened into the image. This is the fork in the road for the entire format. Real text can be magnified, selected, searched, enlarged and read aloud. Flattened text is a picture of words, and a book made entirely of pictures of words is a slideshow with an ISBN.
Amazon's hard upload ceiling for a Kindle eBook is 650MB, which sounds generous until you drop print-resolution artwork into it. The number that actually shapes the work is far lower: past around 50MB the delivery-fee arithmetic and the tooling both start to hurt, and most well-built illustrated books land well under that. We report your final weight and what it costs you per sale.
Yes, on the 70 percent royalty option, and it is one of the least understood costs in self-publishing. The delivery deduction is calculated per megabyte on every sale, forever. An illustrated book carries far more megabytes than a novel, so careless compression is not a one-off mistake, it is a standing charge. Tuning it properly is a few hours of work and it pays for itself repeatedly.
Yes, through media overlays, which synchronise recorded narration to the text and highlight each word as it is spoken. It is the feature that makes a picture book on a tablet genuinely worth having, and it works properly in EPUB 3 fixed layout. You supply the audio; we build the synchronisation and the highlighting.
Apple enforces the pre-paginated specification properly, and Amazon does not. Almost every Apple rejection we see comes down to missing or contradictory layout metadata, a viewport that does not match the artwork, or resources referenced but not declared in the package. It is a real structural fault, Amazon simply chose to overlook it, and you found out from the store that actually checks.
Yes, and the InDesign source makes it considerably easier than the PDF would. The main work is not the conversion, it is the redesign decisions: what happens to a bleed, how a two-page spread behaves on a single screen, where the magnification goes, and which images have to be recompressed. A print page and a screen page are related, and they are not the same object.
Whatever you decide should happen. The device can show it as one wide image, letterboxed and small. It can split it into two pages, which sometimes ruins the composition and sometimes rescues it. It can be declared as a synthetic spread that reunites in landscape. All three are legitimate and one of them is right for your book, but the choice must be made by a person.
It can be far more accessible than it usually is, which is a low bar we would like to raise. Keeping text as text, declaring a reading order, writing meaningful alt text and marking the structure properly gets you most of the way. We will build every part of that. What we will not do is issue you a compliance certificate, since certification is not ours to grant and nobody honest pretends otherwise.
Send us the highest resolution you have, always. We can compress down from a large file and we can never recover detail that was thrown away before it reached us. Print-resolution artwork will not go into the finished eBook untouched, because it would make the file unsellable, but it is the right starting point for producing the version that does.
Traditional picture books are almost always built in multiples of eight because of how print signatures fold, which is why 24, 32 and 40 pages are the common counts. An eBook has no signatures and therefore no such constraint, but the convention is worth keeping if a print edition might follow, and 32 pages remains the number most illustrators design toward.
We can start, and there is a cost to it. The page grid, the text positioning system and the magnification strategy can all be established from roughs and placeholders. What we cannot do is finish, because final artwork changes the composition and the file weight. Most illustrated projects take extra revision rounds for exactly this reason, which is why they are cheaper to buy at the start than at the end.
The artwork at its highest resolution, the text as a separate document rather than baked into the pictures, and a rough page plan showing what goes where. If you have an InDesign file, send that instead of everything else. If you only have a PDF of the print edition, send that and we will tell you honestly what can be recovered from it.
The calculator prices the book by the page and fixes your window before anything is agreed. Send the artwork and the page count, and we will tell you what your book needs on a phone before we tell you what it costs.