Start with the fact that almost nobody tells you: Amazon does not print Arabic. Everything else follows from that, and most of it has to be decided before the layout is built.
There is very little honest English writing about producing an Arabic book, and a good deal of confident writing that is simply wrong. What follows is restricted to things the platforms state themselves, each one linked at the bottom so you can check the date on it.
This is the fact that reorders every plan, and it is stated plainly on Amazon's own Arabic page.
Amazon's list of supported book languages says the same thing in a different way: Arabic and Persian are marked eBook only. It is worth noticing what sits beside them. Hebrew, also written right to left, is available for paperback and for hardcover.
So this is not a limitation of right to left text. Reading direction is not the obstacle. It is Arabic and Persian specifically, excluded from print.
If you want an Arabic paperback, it has to be produced somewhere other than KDP. IngramSpark is the route most people take. Confirm the trim sizes and margin rules with whichever platform you choose before the interior is laid out, because they are not identical to Amazon's and a late change to trim size reflows the whole book.
Amazon names these directly.
| Wrong direction | "We'll reject files set to left-to-right." The file itself has to be right to left, not merely contain Arabic. |
| Title page mismatch | The title page inside the book must exactly match the details typed into title setup. Amazon calls mismatches "one of the most common reasons files are rejected." |
| Language mismatch | "The language you choose and the language in which the eBook is written must match." Select Arabic in the Language section, and enter the title and author name in Arabic too. |
| Scanned pages | The book must be reflowable text, not photographs of the pages of a printed book. This one catches people digitising an older title. |
Amazon lists the symptoms its own reviewers see. They are worth knowing by name, because each has a different cause and a different fix.
Inside an EPUB there is a single attribute that tells a reading system which way the book turns:
<spine page-progression-direction="rtl">
Without it, the pages turn left to right. Your cover lands at the back of the book, the last chapter opens first, and the upload is refused. This is the most common single reason an Arabic ebook is rejected, and it is one line.
It is also not enough on its own. Each content document should declare its own language and direction, which matters most in a book that mixes scripts. See the bilingual section below.
Authors reasonably assume that the tools everyone recommends will handle Arabic. They do not.
| Tool | Arabic |
|---|---|
| Kindle Create | No. Amazon's own list of supported languages is Dutch, English, French, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Malayalam, Marathi, Portuguese, Spanish and Tamil. Arabic is not on it. Amazon's free tool cannot set Amazon's own Arabic books. |
| Atticus | No. Its own documentation warns that non Latin scripts may not export correctly, and its font library is closed, so the Arabic fonts that would be needed cannot be added. |
| Pressbooks | Partially, and fragile. Right to left is a manual setting that depends on the theme, and authors report Arabic correct in the editor and displaying left to right on the public page. |
That leaves professional layout software. The useful thing to know there is that the Middle Eastern features are closer than most people think: in a standard Creative Cloud installation, InDesign's World Ready Paragraph Composer can be switched on in the paragraph panel menu, and it shapes Arabic correctly. Full right to left at the paragraph and page level still needs the Middle Eastern edition.
In other words, the barrier is not that this is impossible. It is that almost nobody bothers, which is a different problem and a smaller one.
Enhanced Typesetting is Amazon's layer for reflowable Kindle books: better hyphenation and word spacing, kerning and ligatures, adaptive drop caps, improved image handling, Page Flip.
Amazon publishes the list of languages that receive it. It runs to roughly fifty entries and includes Hebrew and Persian. Arabic is not among them.
The practical consequence is that an Arabic Kindle book does not get Amazon's justification and line breaking improvements, so whatever quality the text has on screen has to come from the file itself. It raises the value of doing the typesetting properly, because nothing downstream is going to rescue it.
A bilingual book, French and Arabic for instance, is not two books glued together. It is one object with two reading directions, and that creates problems that no consumer tool addresses.
The binding margin sits on the right of a left to right page and on the left of a right to left page. On a spread where one language faces the other, the two inner margins have to mirror, or one language sits closer to the fold than the other and looks like an afterthought.
Put a Latin word in brackets inside an Arabic sentence and the brackets mirror: the one the Arabic reader meets first, on the right, is drawn as a closing bracket. This is correct and it is in the Unicode standard. Tools that do not implement it put the brackets the wrong way round, and the error is invisible to anyone who does not read Arabic.
Arabic is written with Eastern Arabic numerals in much of the Mashreq and with Western digits across the Maghreb. Either is correct. What is not correct is mixing them, and the decision has to hold everywhere, including page numbers, cross references and the index.
Arabic does not break words at the end of a line. Justification is achieved by other means, which means the line length and the spacing have to be chosen with more care than in a Latin text, not less.
Arabic and Latin typefaces do not share an x height. Set at the same point size, Arabic looks cramped beside a Latin serif. Matching them is a judgement made by eye and then measured, and it is the difference between a bilingual page that looks composed and one that looks assembled.
An Arabic letter changes shape depending on what it joins to. Lift it out of the word to make an initial and it takes the wrong form. The opening of a chapter is marked another way.
Send the EPUB or the interior PDF and you get a written report: the reading direction flag, font coverage, numeral consistency, the bidirectional punctuation, the typographic spacing, plus every general check that applies to any book. In plain language, with the pages where each problem sits.