Ebook Proofreading Checklist

Our Book Review team inspects every book submitted to Apple. To ensure that process goes as quickly and smoothly as possible, make sure your book complies with our formatting guidelines.

Use this list to check for common issues in your book file.

What to Test	How to Test
Overall book appearance	Confirm the text, images, and enhanced elements such as audio, video, 3D objects, and widgets appear as you intended.
Table of contents	Review the table of contents. Consider adding art to make it more attractive.
Converting print elements to digital	Make sure any design elements used in the print version of your book are not confusing or out of place in the digital version.
Book file size	Minimize the file size. There is a 2GB file size limit on Apple Books. To check file size as you go, export a sample chapter to Apple Books and note its size. If the file size is large, consider resizing long videos or making large assets smaller.
Book screenshots	Screenshots are optional, but recommended for books with a lot of illustrations.
Blank pages	Make sure your book doesn’t contain any unintentionally blank pages.
Intro media	Verify that the intro media is working and the book opens as expected.
Placeholder images and text	Get rid of any template placeholder images, including book cover, chapter, and section openers, and placeholder text such as “Lorem ipsum.”
Legible text within assets and apps	Make sure the text inside illustrations, maps, graphs, and widgets is legible. Avoid tiny fonts. Use font sizes that can be read by most customers. Don’t use font colors that are too similar to the background color.
Glossary terms	If you have a glossary, make sure all terms have definitions.
Links	Check every link in your book. Does each link go where it should?
Quiz content	If you have quiz questions, make sure they have correct answers.
Image quality	Take a look at the quality of your images. Does the resolution look good when pinched or displayed in full screen? A best practice is to resize, crop, and rotate images to the size and rotation you need before importing them into your book-creation tool.
Images display fullscreen	Check your images. If images are not displayed in full screen, adding a title or caption may fix the issue.
Audio visual elements	Make sure both audio and video files can be heard and speech can be understood even on low volume.
Accessibility: VoiceOver and closed captioning	Test your book’s accessibility with VoiceOver and closed captioning on. A best practice is to include accessibility descriptions — especially for image descriptions — and add closed captioning to videos.
Video guidelines	Follow best practices for video creation, encoding, and compression. Video guidelines are included in the Apple Books Asset Guide.
User interface ease and usability	Test and develop your book with the reader in mind. Make usability a top priority.
Layout and orientations	Test your book in both portrait and landscape orientations (unless you’ve disabled one of the orientations). Be mindful of unnecessary white space in the body and sidebar. If images aren’t displaying in portrait, adding a caption or title may fix the issue.
Device and user compatibility	Test with as many users and devices as possible.
Taps and clicks	If an item looks like it can be tapped or clicked, it should be functional.
Widgets	If you included widgets, make sure they work. Try every widget on each page. As a best practice, refrain from having too many widgets on a single page to avoid slow performance.
3D objects	If you included 3D objects, make sure they spin on the intended axis.