DOCX → EPUB
Turn a Word manuscript into a real ebook. Your heading styles become chapters and the table of contents builds itself.
Drop your DOCX
or click to choose — the only ceiling is your own memory, none on our side
This is the conversion self-publishing authors need most, and the one where the outcome depends almost entirely on how the manuscript was written. A .docx file is a zip of XML that records both what your text means — this paragraph has the style Heading 1 — and how it looks — this run is 16pt Cambria bold. An ebook only cares about the first kind.
So the converter reads Word's named styles and maps them to ebook structure: Heading 1 becomes a chapter, Quote becomes a block quote, List Paragraph becomes a list item. Text you formatted by hand, by selecting it and clicking the Bold button, carries no such statement of intent and converts to exactly what it says it is — bold text in the middle of a paragraph, not a chapter title.
The practical consequence is worth knowing before you start: if your chapter titles are just big bold centred text, the whole book will come out as one chapter with no table of contents. Applying Word's Heading 1 style to them takes a minute and fixes both problems at once. The reading is done by mammoth.js in this tab; the file is never uploaded.
Format by format
| What it does | DOCX | EPUB |
|---|---|---|
| What it stores | Text, styles, direct formatting, revisions, comments | Text and structure, plus a manifest and a table of contents |
| Pages | Fixed, with headers, footers and page numbers | None — the text reflows to the screen |
| Structure comes from | Named styles such as Heading 1 | The OPF spine and the nav document |
| Opens in | Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice, Pages | Apple Books, Kobo, Calibre, Kindle via Send to Kindle |
| Sold in stores | No | Yes — it is what Amazon, Apple and Kobo accept |
| Track changes | Yes | No |
What actually changes
This reads Word's named styles — Heading 1, Quote, List — and maps them to ebook structure. Text you formatted by hand carries less information and converts less well. A manuscript written with styles converts beautifully; one formatted by eye converts into one long chapter.
What survives
What does not
How it works
Old .doc files will not open — open one in Word and save as .docx first.
Pick which level to split on: Heading 1 for chapters, Heading 2 for sections within a long report.
With a working table of contents built from your own headings, and the mimetype entry stored first as the spec requires.
FAQ
Your chapter titles are almost certainly formatted by hand — big, bold, centred — rather than carrying Word's Heading 1 style. Select each one, apply Heading 1 from the styles gallery, and convert again. It takes a minute and it fixes the table of contents at the same time.
No. The old binary .doc format is not supported. Open it in Word or LibreOffice and save as .docx, which takes a few seconds and loses nothing.
Yes. Images embedded in the document are carried into the EPUB. Text boxes and floating shapes are not, because an ebook has no concept of a floating object on a page.
For a clean manuscript written with styles, yes — this produces valid EPUB 3 with an OPF, a nav document and a correctly stored mimetype entry. Run the file through an EPUB validator before you upload it; every store runs one at their end anyway.
They are dropped. Word footnotes live in a separate part of the document and reference the body by ID, and mapping that to an ebook's own footnote convention is a job in its own right rather than a side effect of this conversion.
No, and that is deliberate. The EPUB is built from the document as it currently reads, with revisions resolved. If you need the changes preserved, keep the .docx alongside it.
EPUB. Amazon stopped accepting MOBI for new uploads in 2022, and Kindle devices read EPUB through Send to Kindle. MOBI is the legacy format now, not the target.
DualBook translates the finished EPUB and returns a bilingual or fully translated edition.
