diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 33228e3..d6b8991 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -35,34 +35,21 @@ def run(self):
         _post()
 
 
-class sdistCommand(sdist):
-    def run(self):
-        # verify that we can actually do the converstion
-        import pypandoc
-        long_description = pypandoc.convert('README.md', 'rst')
-        sdist.run(self)
-
-
-# pypi does not render markdown.
-# https://stackoverflow.com/a/26737672/19741
-try:
-    import pypandoc
-    long_description = pypandoc.convert('README.md', 'rst')
-except(IOError, ImportError):
-    long_description = open('README.md').read()
+long_description = open('README.md').read()
 
 
 # adapted from q2cli's setup.py
 
 setup(
     name='redbiom',
-    version='0.3.0',
+    version='0.3.1',
     license='BSD-3-Clause',
     author='Daniel McDonald',
     author_email='wasade@gmail.com',
     url='https://github.com/biocore/redbiom',
     packages=find_packages(),
     long_description=long_description,
+    long_description_content_type='text/markdown',
     include_package_data=True,
     install_requires=['click >= 6.7', 'biom-format >= 2.1.5',
                       'requests', 'h5py', 'pandas', 'nltk',