Portable Markdown documents
A MarkBook is a ZIP archive containing Markdown files, images, and metadata. One file, everything included. Open, portable, AI-generatable.
What's inside a MarkBook?
A .mkb file is a standard ZIP archive. Rename it to .zip and extract it — you get plain Markdown files.
book.mkb (ZIP archive)
├── index.md ← entry point (required)
├── markbook.yaml ← metadata (optional)
├── pages/ ← additional chapters
│ ├── introduction.md
│ └── results.md
└── assets/ ← images and figures
└── diagram.pngOnly index.md is required. A valid MarkBook can be a single Markdown file in a ZIP.
Why MarkBooks?
Markdown is the native output of the AI era. But sharing a .md file with images is broken — paths fail, images get lost, you convert to PDF and lose editability.
| Format | Self-contained | Human-editable | AI-generatable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | No | No | |
| EPUB | Yes | No | No |
| .docx | Yes | Requires Word | No |
| Raw .md | No | Yes | Yes |
| MarkBook | Yes | Yes | Yes |
MarkBooks are EPUB minus everything you don't need. An LLM can produce a valid MarkBook in one response. Try asking Claude: /markbook write a guide about...
Creating MarkBooks
With AI
Ask Claude (or any LLM) to create a MarkBook. The format is simple enough that AI produces valid archives consistently. With Claude Code, use the /markbook skill:
/markbook Write a guide to quantum computingClaude creates a multi-chapter .mkb file you can open directly in Markant.
The MarkBook agent skill is available at markbooks.org/markbook.skill — install it in Claude Code or any compatible AI agent.
With the command line
Markant includes mkb, a CLI tool for creating, validating, and packing MarkBooks:
# Create a new MarkBook project
mkb init "My Document"
# Write your content in the created directory...
# Validate the structure
mkb validate "My Document"
# Package into .mkb
mkb pack "My Document"Install the CLI from Help > Install Command Line Tool in Markant.
Manually
It's just a ZIP file with index.md at the root:
mkdir my-book
echo "# Hello, World" > my-book/index.md
cd my-book && zip -r "../My Book.mkb" .From other formats
Convert EPUB, DOCX, HTML, or LaTeX to MarkBook using mkb convert (requires pandoc):
mkb convert paper.epub --split-chaptersThe open specification
MarkBooks is an open format. The specification is published under CC0 and anyone can implement it.
The format is designed to be trivially implementable. A developer can build a conforming reader in an afternoon. The specification covers archive structure, Markdown dialect, path resolution, metadata, cross-references, integrity verification, and cryptographic signatures.