Portable by design
Your book also has a human-readable Markdown form
Structured Markdown gives you a practical way to move, inspect and back up your project without turning the manuscript into an opaque proprietary file.
A readable project interchange
The export records book metadata, optional sections, chapter order and supported text formatting in a versioned format. It is designed to remain understandable to a person as well as software.
Useful outside the app
Keep a portable backup, inspect changes in ordinary text tools or pass the manuscript through a workflow you control. Re-import is guaranteed for the documented Manuscript to Book structure, not every arbitrary Markdown file.
AI if you want it—not because we impose it
If you choose to use ChatGPT, Claude or another external tool, structured Markdown is usually easier for that tool to work with than a layout-heavy DOCX. Manuscript to Book itself does not use generative AI to write, rewrite, edit or train on your manuscript as part of its core workflow.
Images stay separate
Stage 1 Markdown contains image references and metadata only. It contains no image binaries and no base64 or data-URI images. If an imported reference cannot be reconnected locally, the app keeps a visible placeholder and asks you to reattach it.