We’ll be posting about some upcoming Push to Kindle changes soon. This post though is about recent changes Amazon has made to its Kindle Personal Documents Service. It’s this service that allows Push to Kindle to send converted web articles to your Kindles as ebooks.
Amazon has now made it possible to email EPUB files (.epub) to your Amazon Kindle email address (@kindle.com or @free.kindle.com). Previously this was not officially supported, but Amazon has now updated its documentation and lists EPUB as a supported file type in its Kindle Personal Documents Service.
So it’s no longer necessary to convert EPUB files to MOBI before emailing to your Kindle address. This doesn’t necessarily mean Kindle devices and apps will start natively supporting EPUB files, but it does mean you no longer have to convert these books to a compatible format before emailing them to your Kindle.
If you’ve ever bought a DRM-free ebook, you will likely have been presented with an EPUB download for non-Kindle devices, as well as a MOBI download for Kindle devices. That latter option shouldn’t be necessary now.
Latest reading features?
Currently the latest reading features the Kindle offers (e.g. enhanced typesetting) aren’t available when files are sent in the older MOBI format via the Kindle Personal Documents Service. The same is true if you send an EPUB, but we hope this shift to officially supporting EPUB is a sign that the latest features will soon be made available after the books are converted from EPUB (Amazon has said there will be additional changes related to EPUB support later this year and has marked its MOBI format as not supporting the latest Kindle features).
Will this affect Push to Kindle use?
Not very much. Most of the changes will be behind the scenes. It will likely result in slightly faster turnaround once we switch to sending EPUB files. Currently we produce an EPUB version of the article to be sent and then convert it to Amazon’s MOBI format. Skipping this last step will mean less time processing and smaller files sizes to transfer.
Amazon email: An Update about Send to Kindle
Amazon sent the following email to users of the Personal Documents Service earlier this month:
Dear Kindle Customer,
Thank you for using the Send to Kindle service to send personal documents to your Kindle library. We wanted to let you know that starting August 2022, you’ll no longer be able to send MOBI (.mobi, .azw) files to your library. Any MOBI files already in your Kindle library will not be affected by this change.
MOBI is an older file format and won’t support the newest Kindle features for documents. Any existing MOBI files you want to read with our most up-to-date features for documents will need to be re-sent in a compatible file format.
Also, compatible formats now include EPUB (.epub), which you can send to your library using your Send to Kindle email address. We’ll also be adding EPUB support to the free Kindle app for iOS and Android devices and the Send to Kindle desktop app for PC and Mac.
If you have any questions, please visit our help page or contact our Customer Service team.
Regards,
The Kindle Team