Create and share ebooks to iPhone or iPad, without using Apple's publishing?

Tim Murray2 wrote:

Thanks, but I guess I was not clear about wanting the document to "resize." Word, Pages, and PDF docs will maintain their aspect and margins. I want it to adjust like an eBook. Think Kindle.

Microsoft Word and Apple Pages are word-processing editors with some page layout capabilities, and support various document formats.

PDF is one of various document formats and is specifically intended for printing, and printing inherently does not support text reflow.

EPUB does support text reflow.

Have you generated an EPUB output file using Pages, Word, Affinity, Scrivener, LibreOffice, or other tools, and tested it for your page-reflow requirements, and for whichever unstated app you are using for display here?

Some background material on four of the tools mentioned:

• Create an EPUB book in Pages - Apple Support
• Use advanced book creation options in Pages - Apple Support
• https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/01/ref_epub_export.html
• https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Exporting_to_EPUB_format
• https://www.affinity.studio/help/sharing-about-epub/
• https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/how-to-create-an-ebook-by-compiling-your-scrivener-project

Apple retired their iBook Author app a while back, though it probably still works for those that previously acquired it, and still with access to its prerequisites. And Apple had previously offered their own iBook format with IBA-named files, which was based on EPUB with Apple-proprietary extensions. I don’t know if any current tools support generating new iBook IBA format files.

Transition from iBooks Author to Pages - Apple Support

As for PDFs and such, those are pre-print formats and do not reflow. EPUB will reflow text. Try it.

PS: If you’re solely looking to transfer a file and not reflow text, there are various means to do that, including direct links to iCloud Drive files:

Share files and folders in iCloud Drive on iCloud.com - Apple Support

Tim Murray2 wrote:

This brings up something that really makes me mad about this community: You can't delete a reply! I can see, after giving it a certain amount of time, that it cannot be deleted, but I can't delete it just two seconds after posting? Am I missing something?

You are not missing anything and users cannot delete posts. You are given a certain amount of time to edit a message and it is much longer than 2 seconds. What you have posted may be helpful to others and is the purpose of this Support Community for a person who is looking for a solution to the same topic.

The specific steps to create and share an EPUB book in Pages is seen here where the recipient can view it in the Books app like any other ebook. Publishing the ebook is not required.

Create an EPUB book in Pages - Apple Support

(while I do not know the exact time you have to edit a post, I just added this to my original post 5 minutes later)

The first thing to try is simply emailing the file.

Yes, emailing the epub version is what I meant. When epubs get too big for email, you can put them on Dropbox or another server and send a link to others for downloading.

These forums don’t have a way to delete posts, but I think you can edit for 15 minutes and replace mistaken text by a period if necessary.

Mac Jim ID wrote:

…while I do not know the exact time you have to edit a post, I just added this to my original post 5 minutes late…

Roughly a fifteen minute window exists for editing replies, presently.

Editing cannot delete a reply, only the text.

The hosts can delete a reply, and they can also edit a reply at any time.