Is It Possible to Author An Ebook Using Markdown?

Is it possible to author an ebook (PDF, ePUB) using Markdown? Is there a table of contents generator for Markdown?

Markdown is just a more-formal codification of what already existed. In the era of bulletin-board systems (BBS) and pre-Web Internet (mostly NNTP newsgroups and email), people already uses *asterisks* and _underbars_ to add emphasis to what then plain-text communication. Many plain-text manuals already uses “====” and “----” to indicate headlines or page separators (e.g. the on-line documentation of Norton Commander for DOS). Later on these were codified by John Gruber to convert plain text into bare-bones HTML and later semi-formalized into a group of specifications called “Markdown”. Afterwards, Github became the popular successor to Sourceforge. As a “programmer-first” community, it needs a plain-text formatting language, hence Markdown was selected. On the other side of the community, Wikipedia started to rise and use a formatting language that is rather similar. It then snowballed from there.