Poetry in an ebook
Everything that makes a reflowable ebook good for a novel is aimed at a poem's throat. The device takes a stream of text, decides where each line should end, and redoes that decision whenever the reader changes anything. In prose that is invisible. In verse it is the poet's work being overwritten by a layout engine.
Setting poetry without wrecking it covers the printed page — the measure, the turn, the page break. On a printed page you at least know the width you are setting to. Here you do not, and never will.
What a default conversion does to a poem
Four failures, and they compound.
- The long line wraps where the device chooses. A line that fit your screen runs past the reader's, so the tail drops to the next line at whatever word happened to be last. The poem now has a break the poet did not write, in a place nobody selected, and it reads as intentional because there is no way for it not to.
- A larger type size makes it worse, not better. Every notch up shortens the measure and turns more lines. The reader who most needs bigger text — the one your accessibility work is for — gets the most damaged version of the poem.
- Indentation typed as spaces or tabs collapses or scales wrongly. Typed spaces are characters. Some converters strip them, some keep them and let them wrap onto the next line, and where they survive they grow with the type size, so a stepped poem's steps get deeper as the reader reads more comfortably.
- Stanza gaps made of empty paragraphs disappear. Blank lines are not structure. A reading system that tidies empty paragraphs deletes your stanza breaks outright, and a collection arrives as one continuous block of lines.
Any one of these turns a considered poem into something that looks like a mistake — and the reader blames the poet, not the file.
What the right version does instead
You do not need to know the markup to know what has to be true. Ask whoever is preparing the file, or check the output, against three things.
Every line is marked as a line. Not as a short paragraph, not as a paragraph ending in a manual return. A line of verse has to be a unit the reading system understands as ending where it ends, so it stops looking for somewhere to break and only intervenes when the line genuinely will not fit.
A runover is marked as a runover. When a line will not fit, something has to happen to the remainder, and it should be visibly a continuation — conventionally set with a hanging indent, so the tail sits inboard of the true line starts and a reader can tell at a glance that it is the end of the line above, not a new one. Done properly this is the difference between a poem that survives a narrow screen and a poem that reads as if it were written in a different shape.
Indents are real indents, and stanza breaks are real spacing. An indent expressed as a property of the line holds its relationship whatever the type size; the same indent typed as spaces does not. Stanza spacing expressed as structure survives; blank paragraphs do not.
In the Interior Formatter. The EPUB 3 and the print PDF come from the same structured source, so the poems cannot drift apart between editions, and the ebook carries accessibility metadata, a declared language and ARIA roles — and validates with zero errors and zero warnings under epubcheck. Previews are free and unlimited, so pour the collection and look at it before you decide anything. Start your ebook → · about the Interior Formatter
Concrete poetry is a genuine exception
If the shape on the page is the poem — words arranged into a figure, lines placed by position, a piece that depends on where things sit relative to each other — reflow cannot carry it, and no amount of careful line marking will change that. There are two honest options, and both cost something.
Fixed layout. The page stops adapting. That is exactly what you want for this poem and exactly what you are taking away from readers who enlarge text, which is most of the accommodation an ebook offers. Fixed layout: when the page is the design sets out the whole trade.
An image, with the poem written into the alt text. The shape is preserved, and the words reach a reader using speech. But the text is no longer text: it will not be searched, selected, quoted or resized, and it will not reflow to a phone, so the image has to be legible small or the poem is gone.
Neither is wrong. What is wrong is shipping a shape poem as ordinary reflowable text and hoping.
The poet's own lever is line length
This is worth saying plainly because it is the one thing entirely under your control: shorter lines survive reflow, and long lines do not.
That is not an instruction to rewrite anything. It is information you are entitled to have while you decide how a collection is prepared for digital — which poems go in, whether a piece with a fourteen-word line belongs in the ebook at all or is better held for the print edition, and where you are willing to accept a turned line as part of how the poem now reads. A collection is usually a thin book on paper and an easy one digitally, which is the asymmetry Novellas, serials and short books works through.
The test that is not optional
One check tells you almost everything, and it takes ten minutes.
Find the longest line in the book. Open the file on the narrowest phone you can get hold of, set the reading app to the largest type size it offers, and go to that poem. That is the worst case any reader will ever see, and if the turn is marked properly the poem is still readable there. If it is not, you will know immediately, because the lines will have lost their left edge and the stanzas their shape.
Then check a stanza break and a poem with an indent, at the same setting. Checking an ebook before you publish it has the rest of the pass.
One poem, one screen
Where a poem is short enough, it should begin on its own screen rather than following the previous poem down the page. This is the digital equivalent of the printed convention, and it does the same work: it stops two poems being read as one, and it gives the title somewhere to sit.
For a long poem broken across screens, the break should fall between stanzas, and a reader arriving at the top of a screen mid-poem should be able to tell that is what happened. A section break between poems is structure; a gap is not.
Make your ebook
The tools are free to use: bring your manuscript once and get both a print PDF and an EPUB out of the same source, so the two editions cannot drift apart. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Setting poetry without wrecking it · More: Reflowable text, and the things that break it · Fixed layout: when the page is the design · Covers for poetry and short story collections