A local publishing studio for novelists. Import, edit, typeset, and export print-ready books, all on your own machine.
⬇ Download for Windows or macOS · Built by Will.be · willbe.dev
Real typeset output. Chapter openers, drop caps, scene ornaments, running heads, and footnotes, straight from plain text.
Bindery Studio turns a manuscript into a professional, Amazon-KDP-ready book, the kind of work most authors pay a formatter or a monthly subscription for. Load a Markdown, Word, EPUB, or PDF; edit it in a clean page editor; drop in maps and images; and watch it typeset live into a Reedsy-quality interior PDF whose margins follow Amazon's official page-count rules automatically. Then export to Word, EPUB, HTML, print PDF, or a one-click Publish Pack.
It runs entirely on your own machine: no account, no upload, no subscription. Your manuscript never leaves your computer.
What Bindery Studio is for. It's a tool to help you edit and format your book more easily: layout, typography, covers, and clean exports. It is not a ghostwriter. It won't write your book for you. The words are yours; Bindery Studio makes them look professionally published.
- Download
- Import anything
- The page editor
- Live, print-accurate preview
- Automatic KDP layout
- Typography and customization
- Images, maps, and covers
- Export and publish
- Preflight and the Check tab
- Vireus, an editor built in
- Library, series, and the Reader's Companion
- Privacy
- Requirements
Grab the latest release for your platform:
| Platform | File | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 10/11 | Bindery Studio.exe |
Double-click. Nothing else to install. |
| macOS (Apple Silicon) | Bindery Studio (macOS, Apple Silicon).zip |
Unzip and drag to Applications. |
| macOS (Intel) | Bindery Studio (macOS, Intel).zip |
For older Intel Macs. |
Every download bundles the app, the full font library, and the typesetting engines, so there is nothing else to install. A native window opens; your work is stored locally (under %APPDATA%\Bindery Studio on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/Bindery Studio on macOS).
Open a book from whatever you already have. Bindery Studio reads:
- Markdown (
.md), Word (.docx), EPUB (.epub), HTML (.html), and PDF (.pdf). - Chapters are detected automatically, whether your manuscript uses
#headings,Chapter Onestyle headers, or numbered breaks. - Embedded images are pulled in and re-linked, so figures and maps survive the import.
Everything lands in a clean internal format you then edit, restyle, and export freely between formats.
The centre pane is a real, book-like editing page, not a code box:
- Inline formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and true small-caps.
- Colour: apply a font colour or a highlight to any selection.
- Structure: sub-headings, block quotes, centered passages, verse (poetry), epigraphs, and footnotes.
- Callout / text boxes: tinted panels for asides, notes, tips, or warnings, ideal for non-fiction and textbooks.
- Chapter navigator: every chapter and part in a sidebar you can drag to reorder; add, rename, split, or delete chapters and parts.
- Right-click menu: cut, copy, paste, bold/italic/underline, a row of highlight swatches, add a margin note, or Ask Vireus about the selected passage.
- Typography bar in the editor header puts the controls you reach for most (font, size, spacing) one click away.
- Configurable hotkeys: every shortcut is listed and rebindable in Settings, grouped by Panels, Navigation, Book, and AI.
- Spellcheck with a personal dictionary.
The right pane shows the actual typeset PDF, rebuilt as you write, not an approximation:
- Real running heads, chapter openers that always fall on a right-hand page, clean blank left-hand pages where they belong, and centred page folios.
- Zoom, view a two-page spread, or go full-screen.
- The preview pane is resizable, so you can pull it wide to proof fine detail.
- Because it is the real typesetter, what you see is what KDP prints.
Getting margins right for print is fiddly and Bindery Studio does it for you:
- The inside (gutter) margin is computed from your book's true final page count using Amazon's official table, then the book is re-typeset until it converges, so the binding margin is always correct.
- Choose your trim size (5x8, 6x9, and the rest of the common KDP sizes), paper, and binding (paperback or hardcover) from presets.
- Bleed and outer, top, and bottom margins are handled automatically, with manual overrides when you want them.
This is where Bindery Studio earns the word studio. Most of it is one click away, not buried in menus:
- A 32-family font library, bundled so your output looks identical on any machine: EB Garamond, Cinzel, Vollkorn, Spectral, Cormorant Garamond, Crimson, Libre Baskerville, Lora, Alegreya, Literata, Newsreader, PT Serif, Cardo, Gentium, Source Serif, IM Fell English, Uncial Antiqua, MedievalSharp, Grenze Gotisch, Pirata One, and more. Any font installed on your system is available too.
- A live theme gallery. Browse ready-made looks as actually rendered sample pages, not colour swatches, and apply one in a click.
- Fine control over: body font and size, line spacing (leading), heading font, justification and paragraph style (indented or spaced), first-line indents, drop caps (with adjustable depth), old-style vs lining figures, ligatures, hyphenation, an automatic table of contents, chapter-numbering style (
Chapter One, numerals, or none), running-head content, and decorative scene-break ornaments. - Save any look as a reusable style and apply it to another book instantly, so a whole series shares one identity.
- Insert artwork inline, as a full-page plate, with text wrapping around it, or as a wide map spanning a two-page spread, the fold-out map fantasy readers love.
- Every image gets a print-resolution check that warns you when a picture would print below 300 DPI at its placed size, before you upload.
- Build a print cover (front, spine, and back) that is auto-fitted to the exact spine width for your page count and the wrap geometry for your trim and paper.
- Missing alt text is flagged so your EPUB stays accessible.
One book, every format you need:
| Format | Use |
|---|---|
| Interior PDF | Print-ready KDP interior. |
| Cover PDF | Full print wrap (front + spine + back). |
| EPUB | Reflowable e-book, validated clean (epubcheck) with accessibility metadata. |
| DOCX | Word, including a submission-manuscript style. |
| HTML | A standalone web page of the book. |
| Markdown | Portable plain text. |
| ONIX 3.0 | Industry metadata record (.xml) for distributors and aggregators. |
| Publish Pack | One click: interior PDF + cover PDF + EPUB together. |
Plus one-click destinations that emit exactly the right bundle for KDP Paperback, KDP Hardcover, IngramSpark, a retail EPUB, or a submission DOCX. A guided KDP upload checklist pre-fills every listing field (title, description, seven keywords, categories, ISBN, author bio) with copy buttons, turning the manual Amazon upload into a few minutes of pasting. An exports manager lists everything you have exported and lets you choose exactly which folder it saves to.
Before you publish, the Check tab gives you a quick health read: word count, chapter and part counts, estimated page count and reading time, image DPI warnings, missing alt-text warnings, and printer-specific tips. Fix issues before they reach the store, not after.
Bring your own Anthropic API key (stored only on your machine) and Vireus, the optional built-in AI, will read, typeset, edit, and review the open book, replying right in the app. No terminal, no extra tools.
Its standout feature is inline editorial notes. Ask Vireus to review a chapter or the whole book and it doesn't just chat. It marks the exact passages in your manuscript and attaches a card to each one telling you what needs work, why, and a drop-in suggested rewrite in your own voice, colour-coded by severity (a clear issue, a lighter polish, or a strong rewrite). It reads like working with a real line editor.
Vireus can also:
- Proofread for mechanical errors (typos, punctuation, doubled words) with exact corrections.
- Format a whole book to a house style on request ("format this book, classic fantasy").
- Brainstorm author-facing copy: back-cover blurb, title options, opening lines, dedication, author bio, or a synopsis.
- Remember your preferences and saved styles across sessions.
Vireus formats, edits, and advises at your direction. It does not write your book for you.
For power users, Bindery Studio also exposes an MCP server, so an external AI assistant (for example in an editor or terminal) can read and edit the open book through the same tools. Nothing leaves your machine.
Bindery Studio is built for authors with more than one book:
- The library keeps every book in one place, grouped into named series with a reading order.
- A series bible holds the canonical characters, places, terms, and timeline that span the series, maintained by you and, if you like, by Vireus.
- Cross-book consistency scans a whole series at once and flags an invented term that is spelled, cased, or hyphenated more than one way across books (for example
AshcroftvsAshCroft), showing which book uses which. Fully deterministic, no AI required. - A recap generator writes a spoiler-full "story so far" for the front of the next book.
- The Reader's Companion export turns the series bible into a spoiler-safe world wiki you can ship alongside the books, as a searchable offline HTML page or a companion e-book. You choose how far to reveal: a companion built for Book 1 hides everything introduced later, so it is safe to hand to a reader at any point in the series.
Bindery Studio is a local desktop app. Your manuscripts, images, and settings stay on your computer. The only thing that ever leaves your machine is a Vireus request, and only if you choose to add your own AI key and ask Vireus to do something. There is no account, no telemetry, and no upload of your book.
- Windows 10 or 11, or macOS (Apple Silicon or Intel).
- Nothing else. The typesetting engines and the full font library are bundled inside the download.
Bindery Studio is proprietary software, free to download and use. See LICENSE. The source code is not included in this repository.
Application © 2026 Will.be (willbe.dev). Bundled sample content is provided for demonstration only. Bundled fonts are distributed under the SIL Open Font License.