About
BookFormatter is made by Damien Yvert, an independent developer in France. It is one of a handful of small, free, browser-based tools I build and maintain; the others are linked at the foot of every page.
I am not a publisher and I have not written a novel. What I have is a long-standing interest in typesetting, and the specific observation that the gap between a Word document and a typeset book is almost entirely mechanical: a list of two dozen conventions, every one of which a program can apply, and almost none of which the free tools apply.
Why it exists
Because the state of this category is strange. The best tool is excellent and runs on one operating system. The cross-platform alternative is good and costs $147. And the free end is a field of converters whose output the self-publishing community describes, with some accuracy, as amateur.
Meanwhile the hard parts (paragraph-level line breaking, hyphenation, widow and orphan control, a gutter resolved against the final page count) are all solved problems with published algorithms. Knuth and Plass wrote theirs down in 1981. There is no technical reason a free tool cannot do this well, and now there is one that does.
Why it is free, and what that means
There is no paid tier today. If one appears it will be optional extras: more designs, ornaments, things a book can do without. The EPUB export and the print PDF export will not be behind it. Asking for a card at the download button, after someone has spent an hour on their book, is the specific thing this was built in reaction to.
A tool with no backend costs almost nothing to run, which is what makes that promise cheap to keep. There are no servers processing manuscripts, because there are no servers.
Why your manuscript never leaves your machine
Partly because it is the right default for an unpublished book, and partly because it removes a whole category of promise I would otherwise have to ask you to take on trust. “We delete your file after processing” is unverifiable. “We never had your file” is checkable in ten seconds: load the page, disconnect from the network, format a book.
What it deliberately does not do
The absences are decisions, not a roadmap, and I would rather say so than let them look like oversights:
- It is not a writing tooland will not become one. Your manuscript should live in your writing app, where it is backed up and versioned, not in a browser tab.
- No foot-of-the-page footnotes in print. They become endnotes instead. Placing a note shortens the page, which can push the reference onto the next page, which moves the note. That loop is solvable and it is not solved here.
- No illustrated layout. Cookbooks, children's picture books and anything where the pictures drive the page need a designer or InDesign.
- No AI anywhere. Nothing here rewrites, generates, suggests or summarises a word of your book.
- Eight designs, and no design editor. A design here is a coherent set of decisions; letting every one of them be overridden would produce a tool that makes it easy to build something incoherent.
The comparison page says which tool to use instead in each of those cases, including the ones where the answer is to pay for something.
Being told when it is wrong
The useful reports are specific: a .docx whose chapters were split wrongly, a printed proof where something is off, an EPUB a particular reader refuses. If you can send the file, I can usually find it; if you cannot, and for an unpublished manuscript that is entirely reasonable, a description of what happened is still worth sending.
Elsewhere
The repository for this site is private, so the GitHub link is a profile rather than source you can read.