Which file the bookshop actually wants from you

Most shops want you to upload a Word file or a digital book file, not a PDF. The difference is not only technical: a file whose text flows adapts itself to the reader's screen, while a PDF stays a frozen page at one fixed size.

This is one of those decisions that look marginal and send you back to unnecessary work if you get them wrong.

What the shop accepts at all

At KDP (Amazon's self-publishing platform) the list is longer than you would expect: a Word file, a digital book file in EPUB (an open standard for digital books), a plain text file, a file made in Amazon's own typesetting software, and even a PDF.

But "accepts" and "works well" are not the same thing.

Amazon itself notes that a Word file usually converts fine, except in cases of complex design. For PDF there is a restriction that is easy to miss: it is supported only in a defined group of languages — English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and a few more. Hebrew is not among them.

Why PDF is the weaker choice

Picture a printed page that has been photographed. That is roughly what a PDF is. It is wonderful when you want the page to look exactly the same everywhere — in a book with diagrams, say, or an illustrated children's book.

But a reader holding a small device who enlarges the text does not get a bigger page; they get the same frozen page, now something they have to drag left and right. That is an experience that comes back to you as bad reviews.

For a book of running text — a novel, non-fiction, a memoir — the right format is one where the text flows.

And what you send to a translator

That is a different question from what you upload to the shop, and the answer to it is more clear-cut: the original file the book was written in.

A DOCX (the file format Word saves in) holds not only the words but the structure — what is a chapter heading, what is a quotation, what is an ordinary paragraph. That structure is what lets the translated book come out with the same shape.

Going the other way, sending a PDF, is the hard road. At worst the text in it is really a picture of letters, and then it has to be pulled out first — and from the places where that extraction misses, strange mistakes arrive. We went into it in how to prepare your book file for translation.

What about children's books and illustrated books

Here the rule flips. In a book where the illustration and the text sit together on the page, you cannot let the text flow — it has to stay exactly where it was placed.

Books like that come out in a format where the page is fixed, exactly as in the printed version. That is entirely legitimate, and it is also why a translated children's book is a different job: the new text has to fit inside the same frame on the page, and when the language runs longer, somebody has to decide what to do.

The practical rule: a book of running text — text that flows. A book whose design is part of the content — a fixed page.

The one habit worth more than all the rest

Mark headings as headings.

It sounds small, and it is the thing that makes the most difference. If a chapter heading in your file is just a line you made bigger and bolder by eye, no system knows it is a heading. If you marked it as a heading in the styles menu, everything that comes afterwards — a table of contents, page breaks, navigation in a digital reader, and the translated version — knows what to do with it.

The same goes for a page break: use the page break command, not twenty presses of the enter key.

Five minutes of order in the original file save a day of work in every language you add later. More questions are gathered in the frequently asked questions.