Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
Profhacker Logo

ProfHacker

Teaching, tech, and productivity.

Make Your Own E-Books with Pandoc

By Lincoln Mullen March 20, 2012
Book binding

As devices for reading e-books proliferate, it increasingly makes sense to make publications available in an e-book. There are a number of cases in which you might do this:

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Book binding

As devices for reading e-books proliferate, it increasingly makes sense to make publications available in an e-book. There are a number of cases in which you might do this:

  • If you have a blog and want to make the best posts into an e-book. For example, sociologist Kieran Healy created an e-book of posts from his blog.
  • If you have content in one format that you want to read as an e-book instead. For example, our own Mark Sample took the open-access book Hacking the Academy and turned it into several versions of an e-book for Nooks, iPads, and Kindles.
  • If you want to give your readers the option to read your content as an e-book. For example, I’m the web editor for The Journal of Southern Religion. As a supplement to the articles on the website, I intend to make an e-book of each issue with the articles “bound” together.

Making an e-book can be easy---almost trivially easy---using Pandoc, a tool I’ve written about earlier on ProfHacker. Of course, Pandoc isn’t the only way to do this. Mark has used Sigil and written about it, and another good option is Anthologize, which Julie wrote about.

Since a good way to learn is by doing, let’s create an e-book of My Favorite ProfHacker Posts. You can follow along with the commands below and these files hosted on GitHub, and you can also look at the Pandoc documentation. We’ll use just three posts to keep it simple:

  • Billie’s “Writer’s Bootcamp: The DRAW Method”
  • George’s “The Simplicity of ‘Think-Pair-Share’”
  • Mark’s “Teaching for Uncoverage rather than Coverage”

Here’s how to make an e-book with a few commands.

1. Get a clean copy of each of the “chapters.”

You’ll need a clean, plain-text copy of each of the documents that will go into your e-book. You might have them in your blog, in an HTML file, or perhaps in a LaTeX file. Either Markdown or HTML is fine. In this case, since I don’t have the originals of these posts, I’m going to use Pandoc to grab them from the web and convert them to Markdown. (I explained how to do this in the previous post about Pandoc.) Let’s grab Billie’s post and turn it into Markdown; you’d do the same thing for the other two posts.

ADVERTISEMENT

pandoc -s -r html http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/writers-bootcamp-the-draw-method/23097 -o ch01.hara.markdown

You’ll have to delete the junk from the files, such as the Chronicle’s navigation bar, but this is easy. We’re left with three files, one each for the post by Billie, George, and Mark.

2. Create the front matter

Our e-book will need a little metadata. First we’ll make a simple text file which will be our title page. We’ll call it title.txt. It will have these two lines for the title and author. (See the file on GitHub.)

% My Favorite ProfHacker Posts
% Team ProfHacker

We’ll also need to provide the equivalent of a copyright page, which gives some information about the book. This is also a simple two-line text file, which we’ll call metadata.xml. (See the file on GitHub.)

<dc:rights>The copyright status of this e-book is ambiguous.</dc:rights>
<dc:language>en-US</dc:language>

3. Stitch the e-book together with Pandoc

Now that we have all the parts of the e-book, we can stitch it together with one Pandoc command. You would type this into the command line. (The \s tell the shell that you are breaking one long command into several lines.) The first line calls pandoc, tells it where to find metadata.xml. The second line tells pandoc to output (-o) an EPUB file named my-favorite-profhacker-posts.epub. The remaining lines list the parts of the book in order.

pandoc -S --epub-metadata=metadata.xml \
-o my-favorite-profhacker-posts.epub \
title.txt \
ch01.hara.markdown \
ch02.williams.markdown \
ch03.sample.markdown

And that’s all there is to it: you’re a twenty-first-century Gutenberg. You can download our new e-book from GitHub. Now you have an e-book in the EPUB format, which works on Nooks, iPads, iPhones, and iPods, and which you can easily convert to the MOBI format for Kindle using Calibre.

ADVERTISEMENT

What uses do you have for e-books? Have you made your own e-book? Let us know in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Simon Zirkunow / Creative Commons licensed

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
Duke Administrators Accused of Bypassing Shared-Governance Process in Offering Buyouts
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption
WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin