If you were a Google Playbooks user, you might feel comfortable about Google’s eBook uploading service. By uploading an EPUB book to Google Playbooks, you can save this book in cloud, and sync this book to any device with Google Playbooks app installed, and all your read positions and annotations will also be synced. That’s pretty convenient.
But when you buy a Kindle, things become different, you might want to figure out if this is also doable for Kindle, just like this guy on Reddit.
So today I am gonna explain this problem to those people who are new to Kindle, about if they can upload EPUBs to Kindle and how to do that.
Some Basics
Kindle doesn’t support EPUB format for sure. Of course, you can jailbreak it and install some third-party service like KOReader to get Kindle supports EPUB, but that’s a bit complex for a Kindle newbie. So I am not gonna cover that subject.
In another hand, you can upload eBooks to Kindle’s cloud and sync everything just like what Google Playbooks do, but the format can’t be EPUB.
The supported file formats including:
- Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
- HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
- RTF (.RTF)
- Text (.TXT)
- JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
- Kindle Format (.MOBI, .AZW)
- GIF (.GIF)
- PNG (.PNG)
- BMP (.BMP)
- PDF (.PDF)
Things are getting clearer, as long as we can convert EPUB books to the formats above, then we can upload the file to Kindle.
Convert EPUB to Mobi for Uploading to Kindle
Among all the supported formats, .mobi is the best choice as it is relatively “open” and supported by some reader apps, while .azw is more closed almost only supported by Kindle app. In other words, .mobi files has the better compatibility.
To convert EPUB to Mobi, Calibre is your first choice. It is the swiss knife among those eBook softwares, totally free to use and integrates dozens of main features and rich plugins.
Download Calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/download
For how to use it, you can watch the tour video: http://calibre-ebook.com/demo
If still cannot figure out how to convert EPUB files to Mobi, you can leave a comment here.
Upload Converted Mobi file to Kindle
To save the file in Amazon Kindle cloud, you cannot directly sideload the book to Kindle via USB cable, instead you must use Amazon’s Send to Kindle service.
This Amazon official service provides five methods to upload books to Kindle:
- From your browser (Chrome & Firefox)
- From your desktop (PC & Mac) — Recommend for this case
- From your e-mail — Recommend for this case
- From your Android device
- Send to Kindle for Website Owners (This is for site owner to add a button on the webpage, then visitors can send the content on this webpage to Kindle, it’s not suitable for the issue of this post)
Both the two recommended methods are easy to use, you can refer to the Amazon’s official page for detailed user guide: http://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle
Once the file is uploaded, it takes some minutes for pending, then the book will be displayed in your Kindle Reader or Kindle App’s cloud library. You are free to download it to your device for reading, and everything will be synced.
Summary (Take Aways)
- Convert EPUB to Mobi with Calibre
- Choose a Send to Kindle method
- Upload converted Mobi to Kindle
Just 3 easy steps, you can upload EPUB books to Kindle and sync everything everywhere.
