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        <title>Creating an Ebook With Markdown</title>
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        <section><h1>Creating an Ebook With Markdown</h1><blockquote>Mon 30th March 2020 By David T. Sadler.</blockquote><p>Pandoc is a great tool for converting a file in one markup format into another. This means we can use it to convert a file written in Markdown into an EPUB file that is supported by many e-readers.</p><p>Lets start by writting a very simple markdown file called example_ebook.md.</p><pre><code class="markdown">---
title:
- type: main
  text: Example Ebook
- type: subtitle
  text: An Ebook created from a Markdown file
creator:
- role: author
  text: David Sadler
publisher: Published by myself
---

This is an introduction.

# Chapter 1

This is the first paragraph of chapter 1.

This is the second paragraph of chapter 1.

Below is a list.

- Item One
- Item Two
- Item Three

# Chapter 2

This is the first paragraph of chapter 2.

This is the second paragraph of chapter 2.

# Chapter 3

This is the first paragraph of chapter 3.

This is the second paragraph of chapter 3.</code></pre><p>Note that the file begins with a YAML metadata block that starts and ends with three hyphens (---). This allows you to specify EPUB metadata such as the title and author.</p><p>Converting this to EPUB is done by running pandoc.</p><pre><code class="shell">$ pandoc example_ebook.md -t epub3 --toc -o example_ebook.epub</code></pre><p>There are several options that need to be passed to pandoc.</p><ul><li>example_ebook.md - This argument is the file that you are converting.</li><li>-t epub3 - Set the output format to be EPUB v3 book.</li><li>--toc - Include a table of contents in the output document. This will be derived from the H1 headers in the markdown.</li><li>-o example_ebook.epub - Tell pandoc to output the conversion to the named file instead of stdout.</li></ul><p>You can now copy the file example_ebook.epub to any device that supports the format or use one of the many software readers such as Calibre. However, if you wish to read this on a Kindle device you will need to convert it to the Mobi format.</p><p>Amazon provides a command line tool called KindleGen that can convert our EPUB file into the Mobi format. After downloading the tool just run it as shown below.</p><pre><code class="shell">$ kindlegen example_ebook.epub</code></pre><p>This will create a file called example_ebook.mobi that you can copy to your Kindle to read.</p><h3>Links</h3><a href="https://pandoc.org/">Pandoc.</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown/">Markdown.</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB/">EPUB.</a><a href="https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-yaml_metadata_block">YAML metadata block.</a><a href="https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#epub-metadata">EPUB metadata.</a><a href="https://www.w3.org/community/epub3/">EPUB v3 book.</a><a href="https://calibre-ebook.com/">Calibre Application.</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats#Mobipocket">Mobi Format.</a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&amp;docId=1000765211">KindleGen Application.</a><a href="/posts/markdown/">Markdown - Read More Posts.</a><p>I don't have comments as I don't want to manage them. You can however contact me at the below address if you want to.</p><a href="mailto:david@davidtsadler.com">Email david@davidtsadler.com</a><h3>License</h3><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">The contents of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.</a><p>Copyright © 2021 David T. Sadler.</p><a href="/">Return to Homepage.</a></section>
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