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.

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:

On the shelf	Open on the device

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.5.0 or newer.
• Desktop only — Inkbound is not available on Obsidian mobile (see "Known limitations" below).

Install

From Obsidian's Community plugins browser, once Inkbound is listed there: Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for "Inkbound", then Install and enable it.

From a GitHub release (works today, before the plugin is listed):

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:

Setting	Default	Purpose
Output folder	"" (empty → ~/Downloads)	Absolute path or ~/… folder the EPUB is written to. Existing files of the same name are overwritten.
Default link depth	1	How many hops of wikilinks Export note + linked notes follows outward from the active note (1–3, via a slider).
Backlink listing position	start (Start of chapter)	Where each chapter shows its "Linked from:" list of the chapters in the same book that link to it — at the start of the chapter, the end, both, or none (disables the list entirely). Chapters nothing links to show no list.
Language (dc:language)	"th"	Fallback language used when a note has no usable language frontmatter field.
Fallback author	"" (empty → "Unknown")	Used as dc:creator when a note/index has no usable author frontmatter field.
Device URL	""	The BooxDrop device's address as shown in the BooxDrop app, e.g. http://192.168.1.42:8085. Required for pushing.
Push after export	false	When enabled (and a Device URL is set), every export is uploaded to the device after being saved locally. Below this toggle is a Test connection button to verify the Device URL.

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
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](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 filenames, so 03_recursion appears in the table of contents as written. Rename the files if you want prettier chapter names.

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 are derived separately from headings/filenames.

• 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.

Known limitations

• Desktop only. Inkbound is not available on Obsidian mobile, because it writes the .epub file directly to a folder on disk (the one you choose in Settings) and reads note images through your vault — both of which need filesystem access that mobile does not offer.
• Display math ($$ blocks) has not been verified against a real Obsidian render or a real device yet. It may work, but treat exports containing it with a bit of extra scrutiny until you've checked the result by eye.
• 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