Generate .epub files directly from OrgMode. This will export EPUB version 2, which should give broad compatibility. It should also be relatiely easy to convert the resulting .epub to a .mobi (Kindle).

This depends on Emacs 24.3 and OrgMode 9, it won’t work on OrgMode 8 or any version of Emacs before 24.3.

You will also need a working version of the zip utility.

If you have MELPA stable activated, it is as simple as this:

M-x package-install RET ox-epub RET

See the sample directory for a sample of what ox-epub can do.

Hit C-c C-e E e to publish the current buffer to an EPUB.

There are some required export options that need to be set. These are

• UID a unique id of the document, otherwise known as uri, may be a url
• DATE the date of the document, for valid values see https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
• AUTHOR the document author or editor, the creator in the EPUB spec
• TITLE the document title

Furthermore there are some properties which are optional:

• Subject the subject matter of the book
• Description a description of the book
• Publisher the publisher of the book
• License the rights associated with this book, the copyright notice and further rights may be included in this option.
• EPUBCOVER the cover image to use for the export
• EPUBSTYLE the CSS file to use for the export, this is set by default but can be set on a per document basis

The only other option that is exported:

• LANGUAGE the language of the book, this is to be interpreted according to RFC3066 or it’s succeeding documents https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt, no other interpretations are allowed according to the EPUB spec.

Currently ox-epub can do the following:

• simple cover images
• inclusion of png and jpg images
• export of mathematical formulas
• direct .epub generation
• add stylesheets to your liking: Use the EPUBSTYLE property to add a list of stylesheets and customize html-head-include-default-style to toggle inclusion of the default stylesheet.

• Mathematical formulas only export well if you use the dvipng backend. dvipng should be included in TeXlive.