Markdown to EPUB Converter

This entry was previously listed as an "EPUB Ebook Processor" that parses and analyzes existing ebooks. That was wrong. The linked repo, smerchek/claude-epub-skill by Scott Smerchek (MIT), does the opposite: its markdown-to-epub-converter skill turns Markdown text, Markdown files, or a chat summary into an EPUB3 ebook you can read in Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo, Kindle apps, or any standard reader. The latest release in the changelog is 1.1.0 (2025-10-17), and the last commit we saw on 2026-09-23 was dated 2025-10-18.

Key Features

• Automatic structure: H1 headings become chapters, H2 to H6 become sections, and a table of contents is generated with both EPUB3 NAV and NCX navigation for older readers.
• Formatting: bold, italic, links, nested lists, blockquotes, horizontal rules, and Markdown tables with styled headers and zebra rows.
• Code blocks: since 1.1.0, syntax highlighting uses Pygments (100+ languages) with line numbers, replacing an earlier regex approach. That release also fixed a bug where comments inside code blocks were treated as chapter headers.
• Metadata: YAML front matter sets title, author, language (default en), and date; the title otherwise defaults to the first H1.
• Small dependency set: ebooklib, markdown2, and Pygments, pinned in requirements.txt, plus a test script that checks parsing, generation, and edge cases.

Use Cases

• Reading long research notes or a Claude conversation summary on an e-reader.
• Packaging a blog series or internal documentation as a single offline book.
• Sending technical write-ups with code to a device where PDFs render poorly.

Pricing and Access

Free under the MIT license in the repo. It runs locally with Python 3.8+; no API keys or network calls are needed to build the EPUB.

Getting Started

1. Clone the repo and run pip install -r markdown-to-epub/requirements.txt, then python test_epub_skill.py to confirm the install.
2. For Claude Code, copy the markdown-to-epub folder into ~/.claude/skills/; publish.sh builds a zip if you want to upload the skill elsewhere.
3. Ask Claude: "Convert the markdown file at research_notes.md to an EPUB file."

Limitation: it does not read, search, or summarize existing EPUB files, and it does not produce Kindle-native .mobi or .azw3 (those are listed as future work). Cover images are not generated yet. Development has been quiet since October 2025.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can it analyze an EPUB I already have?

No. For extracting text from an EPUB, use MarkItDown, which lists EPUB among its input formats.

Why does my book look different on each reader?

EPUB readers apply their own fonts and styling; the project notes that structure is preserved while appearance varies.

Alternatives

• MarkItDown Skill: the reverse direction, converting documents including EPUB into Markdown.
• DOCX Skill: when the target is a Word document rather than an ebook.
• PDF Skill: fixed-layout PDFs instead of reflowable EPUB.

Conclusion

Markdown to EPUB Converter is a small, focused, local tool for turning Markdown into readable ebooks. It is not an EPUB analyzer, and it is not actively developed, but it does its one job with few dependencies. Find more document tools in the skills hub.