After refusing to execute this move for 15 years, Amazon announced that all modern Kindle e-readers will support the world’s most popular e-book format, EPUB.
The novelty was announced by the company through a recent update of the documentation of its Send To Kindle function, which indicates that support for this format would arrive at the end of this year.
EPUB support on Kindle, or something similar
Aligning with the trend set by its competition, Amazon chose to open up to the EPUB format on its Kindle devices. This e-book format, in addition to being widely supported by third-party readers, is supported by most online publishers and bookstores.
In it information section on how to send documents to the Kindle library, available on its help portal, Amazon updated details on the procedure for sending files.
Along with reporting that support for files in AZW and MOBI formats will be discontinued, the aforementioned and popular EPUB was added to the list of supported formats. The transfer of these files, like the others admitted, will continue to be carried out under the traditional delivery mechanism, which is done from an authorized email address or through the Send To Kindle application.
This information was initially reported by Good E-Reader, portal from which they add that the added support for this format is not native. Rather, the added feature converts EPUB files to the KF8 / AZW3 format, which is natively supported by Kindle devices.
Given these conditions, it is not possible to directly upload an EPUB file from your computer to a Kindle. However, the announced alternative will provide an option in advance that was not previously provided.
Although, long before we already had tools such as Caliber, which among its functions allows you to convert electronic books to various formats supported by Kindle, this alternative could be cumbersome for less experienced users; and the results obtained, product of the conversion, do not always have a total adaptation guaranteed.
With this move, Amazon opened the doors of its flagship devices to the wide variety of content that can be found today in EPUB format.
Although the most direct and comfortable way to acquire books for Kindle will continue to be through its own ecosystem, through its official Amazon store, it will soon be easier to migrate that collection of books that previously was not so easy to manage in these readers.
