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-Reader: Amazon’s Kindle Personal Documents Service will now accept ePub files sent to your device’s Send to Kindle email address, much the same way you currently handle PDFs and 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’s support document says it will add the same support for converting ePub to file 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 these files “will not support the latest Kindle Document features.” 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 began rolling out the changes to the Kindle UI last September, the first major UI update that e-readers have received since 2016, and more tweaks were added in March of this year. Software changes were accompanied by hardware updates such as the Kindle Paperwhite with a larger screen than the 11th generation.
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