Let me give the answer first.
It is not that "EPUB is not optimised for manga". It is that "the optimisation exists in the specification and nobody uses it".
Those sound alike but mean very different things. If it were the first, there would be nothing to do but give up; if it is the second, the situation can change. Here is how it breaks down.
To start with, fixed layout itself was put there for manga. Even the W3C explanation says fixed layout was implemented for the digitisation of comics, children’s books and magazines. This is not a case of a format built for text being forced into a job it was never meant for.
In fact, EPUB even has a specification for defining panel-by-panel reading. It is called Region-Based Navigation.
That specification states plainly that providing a way to read panel by panel is an important requirement for manga, comics and magazines. As a worked example it takes a manga page with six panels and demonstrates how each panel is defined and in what order they are read.
It goes finer still: you can nest regions inside a panel. The design anticipates treating each speech balloon as its own region.
EPUB does not merely line up one image per page — defining panel positions and reading order so that a phone can walk through them one panel at a time is a standard feature of the format.
Here is the crux. In practice, no reading app supports this part of the specification.
There is a telling example. A developer of the painting software Krita actually implemented export of this region navigation. The work itself took about two hours, and the resulting EPUB passed validation. Building it to spec is genuinely not hard.
And yet the same developer wrote that they could not confirm whether any reading software existed that displayed the file correctly. You can build exactly to spec and still find nowhere that can read it.
That is what "the specification exists and nobody uses it" means in practice. A creator can do everything right and there is still no route to the reader.
So what is the panel-by-panel view you get when reading manga on Kindle? It is not a standard EPUB feature.
Amazon has its own mechanism called Panel View (Guided View), built on Amazon-specific markup: regionMagnification , targetIdto point at a panel, ordinal to set the order — all Amazon’s own.
On top of that, when the publisher has not marked up any panels, a feature called "Virtual Panels" kicks in automatically. Amazon splits and magnifies the page even if the creator did nothing.
Laid side by side, it comes out like this.
| EPUB standard | Amazon’s own | |
|---|---|---|
| A panel-view specification | Yes | Yes |
| Reading environments that support it | Almost none | Yes |
| Works without the creator marking it up | No | Filled in automatically |
In short, panel-by-panel manga reading exists because of Amazon’s implementation, not the standard. That is where things stand.
Building a scrupulously standards-compliant EPUB does not guarantee it reads well as manga. Conversely, in Amazon’s environment it reads acceptably even when the file specifies nothing.
"Making a correct EPUB" and "reading comfortably as manga" are not connected — and that is the source of the unease you feel while building one.
For vertical-scroll work — webtoons — there is no defending the format.
At the heart of fixed layout is the idea of splitting into pages in advance: one HTML file corresponds to one page. The notion of scrolling continuously downward simply does not exist in the specification.
So putting a vertical-scroll work into an EPUB always means cutting it into pages somewhere. The unbroken flow that is the point of the work is structurally lost.
It is not technically impossible. It is that the design of the format and the nature of the work run head-on into each other.
Written out like that it sounds bleak, but things are moving.
The EPUB 3.4 currently being drafted has, alongside items like dark-mode support and standardised footnotes, a dedicated team looking at digital comics.
EPUB 3.4 reached Candidate Recommendation in July 2026, and a formal Recommendation is expected on or after 19 October 2026. How manga should be handled in EPUB is being argued out internationally right now.
The practical judgement at this point looks like this.
Amazon takes your EPUB, converts it to its own format and distributes that. The panel-view experience is left to Amazon’s machinery, so there is currently almost no point labouring over standard panel definitions. You are safer concentrating on the quality of the page images themselves and on getting the basics — binding direction, page order — right.
Fixed-layout EPUB reliably does the job of displaying pages correctly. Keep it to the plain one-image-per-page build and it will read fine in most apps. Give up on panel view and put the care into spreads and image resolution instead.
It is worth stopping to ask whether EPUB is the right container at all. Check whether the place you are publishing really wants EPUB. If you can distribute the images as they are, that is truer to the work; if a store submission requires EPUB, then EPUB it is. Work backwards from the purpose.
Pick a folder of images and you get a fixed-layout EPUB with the binding direction and page size sorted out. No account, no installation.
Try EPUB FACTORY