Creating your EPUB and MOBI files is just one step in the process.

Personally I prefer creating the MOBI myself so I can be 100% sure that the formatting is what I want. While you can upload an EPUB file to Kindle Direct Publishing, they will just convert it to a MOBI anyway. MOBI, on the other hand, is required by Amazon for the Kindle. EPUB is used by iBooks (as well as other platforms) and is as close to a ‘standard’ ebook format as it gets.

There are two main ebook formats - EPUB and MOBI.

In order to publish our book, we’ll need to convert it to a format that includes all of the extra stuff necessary for our book including a table of contents, cover image, and metadata (which is just a fancy word for key attributes of your book like author, title, publisher, etc.).

Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format.

If you’ve never done this before, you’ll need to understand a few basic concepts. I’ll go into this more later, but for now, it’s worth noting that the two file formats we are targeting are EPUB (the ‘standard’ ebook format), and MOBI (what Amazon uses for their Kindle platform).

Next, we’ll walk through how to create the files you need for Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iBooks, and just about every other publishing platform out there. In part one, we learned how to write and format your book in Markdown.

Mobi file