Andrew Cunningham
Amazon’s Kindles are some of the best dedicated e-readers you can buy, but a long-standing criticism from users of DRM-free books from non-Amazon sources is that they don’t support the open ePub standard. That has changed sometime in the recent past, As spotted by Good E-ReaderSend to Kindle: Amazon’s Kindle Personal Document Service will now accept ePub files sent to your device’s email address, the same way you currently handle PDFs, Word documents, and other image and text files.
Kindles still don’t support side-loading of ePub files – Send to Kindle converts documents to AZW3 files, something users can already do themselves using a variety of free tools. But Amazon’s official support removes a step from the process and will help users avoid third-party conversion sites that are full of ads. We tested it with an 11th generation Kindle Paperwhite running the latest version of Kindle software, and the conversion seemed to go through without a hitch.
If using the Send to Kindle email address is still too cumbersome, amazon support document It says it will add the same ePub to file conversion support Send to Kindle Apps Sometime in late 2022. Amazon also says it will stop supporting Send to Kindle for MOBI files in late 2022, because those files “will not support the latest Kindle features for documents.” MOBI files that are already on your device will stay there and continue to work as they currently do.
This lackluster support for ePub files is one element of a slow fix for the software that’s moved to newer Kindles over the past year or so. Amazon started Changes to Kindle UI rolled out last Septemberwhich is the first major UI update that e-readers have received since 2016, and More modifications have been added In March of this year. Software changes were accompanied by hardware updates such as Kindle Paperwhite with the largest screen of the 11th generation.
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