Check your EPUB before KDP, Apple or Kobo bounce it
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R. S. Breed Founder
Most ebook rejections are small things: a cover that isn't marked as the cover, a contents link that points nowhere, a page with an unclosed tag, an image too big for Apple, a stray file the package doesn't list.
Drop your EPUB in here before you upload: https://bervet.com/tools/epub-checker
It goes through:
- Structure: the parts every EPUB needs, every file listed and every listed file actually there. File names that only differ in capital letters get named. Windows doesn't care about those; e-readers do.
- Book details: title, author, language and identifier, and whether the ISBN in the file is a real one.
- Cover: KDP and Google Play both want the cover inside the book as well as uploaded separately.
- Table of contents: there, complete, in reading order, no duplicates, every link working. That's straight from KDP's navigation guidelines.
- Pages and links: well-formed XHTML, no dead links or missing images, nothing loaded from the internet, no JavaScript.
- Images: Apple's pixel limit, and alt text on every image.
- Styles: the body text settings KDP asks you to leave to the reader. That means size, line spacing, colour and side margins, which is what stops readers changing them on their Kindle.
Every problem comes in plain English, with which store it matters for. Each rule comes from KDP's, Apple's, Google Play's, Kobo's or B&N's own help pages.
One honest note: this isn't EPUBCheck, the W3C's full validator. Apple and Google require a file that passes it, and Kobo runs it on every upload, so run that too. This catches the common problems and tells you what they mean.
It runs in your browser. The book isn't uploaded and nothing is kept. Free for members.