Why I Built Koberger

I've been publishing books as an indie author since 2020.

Like many self-published authors, I spent years searching for the right combination of tools to take a manuscript from first draft to finished book. Writing software was easy enough to solve. Formatting was a different story.

For the last few years, I've relied on Vellum to format my ebooks and print interiors. In my opinion, it's one of the best book formatting tools available today. It's fast, polished and produces beautiful results. For a long time, I had no reason to look elsewhere.

Then my MacBook died.

Not suddenly. It suffered from a long, slow decline that involved battery issues, random crashes and increasingly desperate attempts to keep it running. Eventually, it reached the point where replacing it was unavoidable.

At the time, I was doing most of my work on Windows.

As a web developer, I spend my days building websites and software, and I already had a perfectly capable Windows machine sitting on my desk. The problem was that my book formatting workflow depended on a piece of software that only ran on a Mac. I found myself in the unusual position of considering the purchase of an entirely new computer for a single application.

Looking for Alternatives

Naturally, I started looking at other formatting tools.

One of the first platforms I tried was Atticus. Atticus takes a different approach to Vellum, combining writing and formatting tools into a single platform. For many authors, that's a huge advantage. The problem was that I wasn't looking for a writing tool. I already had writing tools and a workflow that worked for me. I didn't want to move away from Scrivener and Word.

I wasn't interested in replacing either of them. What I wanted was a dedicated formatting tool. Something that would take a finished manuscript and turn it into professional EPUB and Print PDF files. Something that wasn't tied to a particular operating system.

Surprisingly, I struggled to find exactly what I was looking for.

The Developer in Me Started Asking Questions

At that point, the developer side of my brain started getting involved.

I've spent more than twenty years building websites and software for clients. My day job involves solving problems with code, and the more I looked at the formatting tools available to authors, the more I found myself wondering:

Why isn't there a modern, browser-based formatting platform that focuses entirely on publishing? Not writing. Not project management. Not AI. Just book formatting.

The more I thought about it, the more the idea refused to go away.

Building the Tool I Wanted to Use

Koberger started as a personal project. The goal wasn't to disrupt publishing or replace every other tool on the market. The goal was much simpler:

Build the formatting software I wanted to use.

A platform that could:

• Import a Word manuscript
• Generate professional ebooks
• Create Print PDF files
• Work on Windows, Mac and Linux
• Run entirely in a browser
• Stay focused on formatting and publishing

Most importantly, I wanted it to fit into existing author workflows rather than replace them. If you love Word, keep using Word. If you write in Scrivener, keep using Scrivener. If you draft in Google Docs, that's fine too.

Koberger isn't designed to replace your writing software. It's designed to help you publish once the writing is done.

Built by an Indie Author

One of the advantages of building software for a problem you've experienced yourself is that you understand the frustrations.

I've uploaded books to Amazon KDP, Kobo, Apple Books and Google Play Books. I've reformatted manuscripts at the last minute, sometimes dozens of times. I've fixed strange EPUB issues. I've ordered proof copies and spotted mistakes that somehow survived multiple rounds of editing.

Everything in Koberger has been influenced by those experiences. Not because I think I've discovered the perfect publishing workflow, but because I've spent enough time self-publishing to understand where many of the frustrations live.

What's Next?

Koberger is still evolving. There are features I'd like to add, workflows I'd like to improve and ideas I'd like to explore. But the core goal remains the same as it was when I started:

Make professional book formatting more accessible to authors, regardless of what computer they use or how they choose to write.