The Amazon Kindle will finally be able to read books in EPUB, one of the most desired functions

Amazon has confirmed that its Kindle devices will gain EPUB support, though it won’t be complete and users won’t have the freedom to put EPUB books on the device.

Kindles, including the Kindle, are practically the only e-book readers that don’t support the EPUB format, one of the most popular; most manufacturers support it, allowing you to read the same book you bought or obtained on all of your devices except the Kindle. As Amazon’s platform is the most popular, until now the company has had little motivation to support a “competitor” format. Users have had no choice but to use alternative programs, such as Calibre, to convert the format to the one used by Kindles.

By surprise, Amazon has now announced EPUB support on its platform, although it has done so a bit behind the scenes, since it has not notified the press; only the customer help document has changed.

That doesn’t mean the Kindle can now read EPUB files; Instead, we’ll have to use Amazon’s Send Documents to Kindle system. When we configure our Kindle, we can configure an email address, to which we can send documents that we want to read on the device. We can see this address if we go to the Settings and enter “My account”, in the “Send to Kindle E-Mail” section. From now on, we can send EPUB files to that address, and Amazon will automatically convert them to Kindle format and we’ll have them delivered to the device for reading.

Along with this change, Amazon has announced the end of support for old formats such as MOBI and AZW, although it has clarified that the files that we already have on the device have not been affected; it’s just that we will no longer be able to send files in those formats to our Kindle. The reason given by Amazon is that these formats do not support the new features of the Kindle.

If you used Caliber or another program to put books on your Kindle, these new features don’t affect you, but at least if you now buy an EPUB book from another store, you can send it to your Kindle by mail and you can read it without problems. Amazon may have implemented this to avoid accusations of unfair competition, especially in the European Union, but that’s just speculation as the company hasn’t announced this change.