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 |
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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. |