Zoom / Kindles still won’t open ePub files directly, but now there’s one less hoop to go through.
Andrew Cunningham
Amazon’s Kindles are some of the best specialized e-readers you can buy, but long-standing criticism from DRM-free book users from sources outside of Amazon is that they don’t support the open ePub standard. This has changed at some point in the recent past, as noted by Good E-Reader: Amazon’s Kindle Personal Document Service will now accept ePub files sent to your Send to Kindle’s email address in the same way as in currently processes PDF files, Word documents and other graphic and text files.
Kindles doesn’t yet support initial side-loading of ePub files – the Send to Kindle service converts documents to AZW3 files, something users could now do on their own using a variety of free tools. But official support from Amazon removes a step from the process and will help users avoid shady third-party conversion sites saturated with ads. We tested it with the 11th generation Kindle Paperwhite, which works with the latest version of Kindle software, and the conversion process seems to have gone smoothly.
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If using the Send to Kindle email address is still too burdensome, the Amazon Support Document says it will add the same ePub conversion support to its Send to Kindle apps sometime in late 2022. Amazon also says it will discontinue support for Send to Kindle for MOBI files by the end of 2022, as these files “will not support the latest Kindle features for documents.” The MOBI files that are already on your device will stay there and continue to work as they do now.
This inconvenient support for ePub files is one of the elements of slow software processing that has spread to newer Kindles in the last year or so. Amazon began making changes to the Kindle user interface last September, the first major user interface update that e-readers received since 2016, and even more settings were added in March this year. Software changes have been accompanied by hardware updates such as the 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite with a larger screen.
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