Instant E-Books

When it comes to producing ready-to-publish e-books, you have plenty of tools to choose from: You could write an entire book using a word processor like LibreOffice Writer and then convert the final result to the EPUB format, or if you prefer a more direct approach, you can opt for a dedicated e-book editor like Sigil, and Calibre can come in useful when you need to convert an existing HTML document into an e-book.

However, if you happen to use a text editor as your writing tool of choice and Markdown as the preferred formatting system, then you have another option: You can use Pandoc [1] to convert Markdown-formatted text files into an e-book. This powerful and flexible tool is perfect for generating e-books in the EPUB and other formats from the command line. In fact, you can generate an e-book in the EPUB format complete with a cover image, a table of contents, and a custom layout with a simple shell one-liner:

pandoc -f markdown -t epub \
  --epub-cover-image=cover.jpg \
  -o foo.epub --toc \
  --epub-stylesheet=stylesheet.css foo.md

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