Inkbound

Inkbound

Inkbound exports your Obsidian notes as EPUB ebooks, so you can read them comfortably on an e-ink device instead of a laptop screen.

What you get

Export from the command palette or a right-click menu, in three ways:

• A single note becomes a one-chapter book.
• A folder of notes becomes a book, with chapters in filename order.
• A note plus everything it links to — the active note and the notes it links to, out to a depth you choose, become one book, with real links between the chapters that came from the same export.

Every export produces a real, valid EPUB 3 file. Images in your notes come through, and so do Mermaid diagrams — as pictures rather than live diagrams, since most e-ink readers cannot draw them otherwise. Any language works, including Thai.

Books get covers. Set cover: in a note's frontmatter (a vault path, a [[wikilink]], or a URL) and the finished book carries that artwork: it shows on your e-reader's library shelf, and the book opens on a full-page cover before the first chapter. No cover:? The first image of the note becomes the cover automatically.

The table of contents navigates to the section. Every chapter's headings appear as sub-entries in the book's TOC, so on an e-ink reader you can jump straight to a section instead of scrolling a long chapter. The setting TOC heading depth (default level 3) controls how deep the sub-entries go; set it to Off for the plain chapter-only TOC.

Math typesets as pictures. Inline $...$ and display $$...$$ LaTeX in your notes renders at export time (MathJax) and embeds as plain images — the same strategy as Mermaid — so it displays identically on every reader, including e-ink devices that cannot draw inline SVG. Display math sits centered on its own line; inline math rides the text baseline. Expressions that cannot render (broken LaTeX, or non-Latin text such as Thai inside the delimiters) degrade to a readable fallback with an export warning instead of failing the book — write prose outside the delimiters for Thai text.

Thai books carry their own font. Any book whose chapters contain Thai gets Noto Sans Thai (Regular + Bold, SIL OFL 1.1) embedded automatically, so Thai renders consistently on e-ink readers even when the device has no Thai font of its own — correct compound vowels included. The license text ships inside the book; Latin text keeps the reader's normal reading font. Books without Thai stay fontless and byte-stable, and the Embed Thai font setting turns the whole behavior off if you ever want it.

From note to e-reader

A book's index note in Obsidian, with its chapters as linked notes:

Right-click it and export the note plus everything it links to:

With Push after export turned on, the finished book lands straight in the Boox library over Wi-Fi and reads like any other EPUB — Thai text, tables and all:

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.5.0 or newer.
• Desktop and mobile — Inkbound runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and on iOS and Android. Where books are saved differs by platform (see "On a phone or tablet" below).

Install

From Obsidian's Community plugins browser — the easiest way, and the one that keeps Inkbound updated for you:

1. Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
2. Search for Inkbound, then Install.
3. Enable it.

That works on desktop and on mobile alike.

From a GitHub release, if you would rather install manually:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy all three files into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/inkbound/ (create the folder if it doesn't exist).
3. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins and enable Inkbound.

[!WARNING] If Obsidian was already running when the plugin folder was added, the new plugin will not appear in the Community plugins list until you click the refresh icon at the top of that list (or restart Obsidian).

How to use it

Three commands, available from the command palette and from a right-click context menu:

• Export note to EPUB — exports the active note (or the note you right-clicked) as a single-chapter book.
• Export folder as EPUB (active note's folder) — exports every note in the active note's folder as one book. Right-clicking a folder directly offers the same export for that folder.
• Export note + linked notes to EPUB — exports the active note plus the notes it links to as one book.

The finished .epub is written to the folder set in Settings → Inkbound → Output folder (~/Downloads by default), and a notice in Obsidian confirms the path once the export finishes. If Push after export is turned on, the same notice reports whether the send to your Boox device succeeded.

Settings

Found under Settings → Community plugins → Inkbound:

A worked example

Say you keep book notes like this, one folder per book, one note per chapter:

Reading/
└── grokking-algorithms/
    ├── grokking-algorithms.md      <- the index note
    ├── 01_introduction.md
    ├── 02_selection_sort.md
    ├── 03_recursion.md
    ├── 10_where_to_go_next.md
    └── assets/
        └── fig02-1_arrays.png

Give the index note this frontmatter:

---
aliases:
  - Grokking Algorithms
author: Aditya Y. Bhargava
language: english
cover: assets/grokking-cover.png
coverUrl: https://example.com/grokking-cover.jpg
tags:
  - book
  - main
---

Then right-click the grokking-algorithms folder and choose Export folder to EPUB. You get a single Grokking Algorithms.epub containing:

• The index note first, then the chapters in numeric order — 01, 02, 03, 10. Note that 10 comes last, not after 01, because the NN_ prefix is read as a number rather than sorted as text.
• Grokking Algorithms as the book title, taken from aliases rather than the filename, with Aditya Y. Bhargava as the author.
• The cover image downloaded from coverUrl and embedded, so it shows on your reader's shelf.
• Every figure from assets/ embedded in the chapter that references it, whether you wrote it as ![[fig02-1_arrays.png]] or ![Arrays](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kidpeterpan/inkbound/HEAD/assets/fig02-1_arrays.png).
• dc:language set to en, from language: english.

The index note is found by its book + main tags. If you would rather not tag it, name it after the folder instead — grokking-algorithms.md inside grokking-algorithms/ is detected the same way. Without either, the folder name becomes the title and every note is treated as a chapter.

Chapter titles come from each note's first # heading when there is one, so 03_recursion with an # Recursion heading appears in the table of contents as Recursion. No heading? The note's frontmatter aliases are used next, then the filename as a last resort. One consequence: in a folder export, the index note's own heading (often the book title itself) becomes the first TOC entry — that is expected, not a bug.

The table of contents also lists each chapter's own headings underneath it — the ## and ### sections inside a long chapter — as links that jump straight to that section when tapped. Use the TOC heading depth setting to include deeper levels, or turn it off for the plain chapter list.

Frontmatter fields

Every export scope resolves its book metadata from the exporting note's own frontmatter (the active note for single/linked exports, the detected index note for folder exports). Recognised fields:

• aliases — sets the book title (dc:title). The first non-empty string, or first non-empty string in the list if aliases is a list, is used; otherwise the note's filename is used. This is the book title only — chapter titles come from each note's first # heading, falling back to aliases and then the filename.

• author — sets dc:creator. A string is used as-is; a list of strings is joined with ", "; anything else falls back to the Fallback author setting, or "Unknown".

• language — sets dc:language. A BCP-47 tag (e.g. en, en-GB, th) is used as-is (lowercased). Otherwise, one of these names is matched, case-insensitively:

  Frontmatter value	dc:language
  thai	th
  english	en
  japanese	ja
  chinese	zh
  korean	ko

  Anything else falls back to the Language setting.

• coverUrl — the book's cover image, as a full http:// or https:// URL. A cover that fails to download degrades the export to coverless rather than failing it.

• tags: [book, main] — for folder exports, marks which note in the folder is the index/metadata source. If no note is tagged this way, Inkbound looks for a note whose filename matches the folder name.

Sending to a Boox

Pushing to an Onyx Boox e-ink device is entirely optional. Turn on Push after export and set your device's Device URL (shown in the BooxDrop app on the device — both need to be on the same Wi-Fi network) and every export is uploaded straight to the device's library after it saves. The local file is always written first, so a failed push never loses your export — it just stays in your output folder.

On a phone or tablet

Inkbound works on Obsidian mobile too, with the same three exports. The one real difference is where the book goes. A phone has no folder-anywhere filesystem the way a laptop does, so mobile saves books inside your vault, in the folder set by Settings → Inkbound → Output folder (mobile) (Exports by default). From there you can open the book in a reading app, or reach it through your device's own file access.

That gives you two independent settings — one for desktop, one for mobile — and each device only ever reads and writes its own. If you sync your vault, changing the mobile folder on your phone will never move where your desktop saves books, and vice versa.

Because books are saved into the vault, they sync like any other vault file. If you would rather they didn't, point the mobile output folder at a folder your sync excludes.

To send a finished book somewhere else, run Share last exported book from the command palette. It appears only on devices that support sharing — if you don't see it, the book is still saved exactly where the notice said it is.

Push to a Boox works from mobile too, over the same Wi-Fi, so you can go from note to e-reader without a computer anywhere in the loop.

Known limitations

• Where mobile can save. On a phone or tablet, books are saved inside your vault rather than to a folder of your choosing anywhere on the device — that's a platform restriction, not a setting. See "On a phone or tablet".
• Math typesets as images. Expressions are rendered at export time and embedded as pictures (like Mermaid diagrams), which means they are no longer selectable or searchable text inside the EPUB. Math containing non-Latin text (e.g. Thai inside $...$) cannot be rendered — it stays as readable source text with a warning.
• Individual table rows cannot be embedded. Block-scoped embeds (![[Note^block]]) now work for every kind of block Obsidian lets you label — paragraphs, headings, tables, code blocks, callouts and blockquotes, whole lists, and single list items (which bring their sub-items with them). A table row, though, is not something Obsidian can address: a ^id typed inside a cell is just cell text, so an embed pointing at it degrades to a placeholder plus an export warning, same as any block ID that doesn't exist.
• Mermaid diagrams export as images, not text. They are converted to pictures at export time so e-ink readers can display them, which means they are no longer selectable or searchable text inside the EPUB.

Development

Building from source, running the test suite, and the architecture notes live in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.

Support

Inkbound is free and MIT-licensed. If it saves you time, you can buy me a coffee — entirely optional, and it never affects the plugin's features.

License

MIT © 2026 kidpeterpan