It only took about 15 years, but Amazon’s Kindle will finally support the ePub format. First noticed by Good E-Reader, Amazon has updated its Kindle section with the news that the Send to Kindle feature will convert ePub files to a format that can be opened to the e-reader. The update is scheduled for the end of 2022.
This is a change that – at first glance – seems rather insignificant, but in fact solves an existing problem in the e-book industry. Amazon’s Kindle Store is a major e-book retailer, and ePub is the most widely used e-book format. But so far, Kindle devices could not read the ePub format. For Kindle owners who had to deal with manually converting their e-book library to a more Amazon-friendly format with an app like Caliber, this would be a welcome change.
But another upcoming change is that the Kindle will finally lose the ability to support MOBI, an older French file format that was Amazon’s own e-book format for a while. Amazon acquired Mobipocket in 2005 and subsequently rebranded AZW’s MOBI. If you already have e-books in any format on your Kindle, you can still access them. The update only applies to new ebooks.
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