The Kindle or Amazon Kindle is one of the best devices for reading electronic books. For quality price, and thanks to its extensive catalogue, we can enjoy hours of reading with the comfort offered by electronic ink and the size of the Kindle. However, what if you want read books outside from the Kindle Store? The standard ePub format doesn’t render well on Kindle, so you’ll need to convert your ePub books to make them readable on Amazon’s reader.
If you purchase or have electronic books, usual formats they are usually PDF or ePub. The first is well known. For its part, ePub is an open standard format that, in principle, should be readable in all types of readers. But it’s not like that. Amazon and its Kindle opt for their own format, known as MOBI.
So you have books in ePub format, you will have to convert each ePub (electronic publication) to MOBI (mobipocket) to be able to send it to your Amazon Kindle and thus read it comfortably. The good news is that the process is simple and will not take long. Let’s see how.
Convert ePub to MOBI from the browser
The first step to reading ePub books on a Kindle is obviously adapt those books to the compatible format with Amazon readers. That is, we have to convert ePub files to MOBI. Something that is not as simple as changing the file extension but that does not require excessive technical knowledge either. Furthermore, there are multitude of converters For this task.
For example, we can go to an online converter. No need to download anything. You open it in the web browser of any device, upload the ePub file and go. To convert ePub to MOBI online try these links:
The above four converters are meant to make your ePub books readable on Kindle devices. The process is fast, free and you can upload multiple books. Also, you can upload ePub books from your device, from Google Drive, from Dropbox or from a link.
But if you want to control all the possible parameters when converting ePub to MOBI, in that case you may prefer to go to an application of the stature of Caliber. Recommended by everyone for several reasons: it is used to read, to organize and to convert between various formats. Another advantage of using Caliber is that it will help you convert the books to the ideal format for Kindle and then send them to the device from Amazon.
Convert ePub to MOBI with Caliber and send it to Kindle
First we open Caliber, once installed, and load the books we want to convert. To do this, click on the button Add books and select the ePub files that we are going to manage. You will see them listed in the main panel of the application with the information of the available metadata. Second, we select which books we are going to convert. It can be all of the ones on the list or just a few. Then we click on the button Convert books and the conversion window will open.
In that window you will see a preview of what the book will look like. You can choose from a multitude of formats from the dropdown Output format, in the upper right corner. You will also have the opportunity to edit the available metadata, namely: title, author, tags, editorial, notes… You can even add a cover, if it does not have one, or change it from Change cover image.
When the conversion finishes, you will already have a MOBI file available next to the original ePub. To view it, you’ll need to select the book from the Caliber list, right-click, and choose the option Open containing folder.
The last step is to send the book in MOBI format to your Amazon Kindle. There are several ways. The most comfortable, via email. We will explain it later. If you don’t want to leave Caliber, when you connect your Kindle to your computer via USB cable, Caliber will detect it. If you click on the dropdown Device of Caliber you will be able to access its content.
Then, by clicking on Add books you can add books to your Kindle. As they are uploaded to your Amazon device, you will see them in the list displayed by Caliber. At the end, we disconnect the Kindle from Devices > Disconnect this device, then we disconnect the USB cable and that’s it. You already have your ePub books to read on Kindle.
Email Books to Kindle
We said that the most convenient way to send content to Kindle is by email. so you don’t have to connect the device by USB. Although this option can also be comfortable for you. The point is that through the Kindle Personal Documents service, you can send documents to your Kindle in DOC, DOCX, PDF, TXT, AZW, MOBI, RTF, PRC, PSZ, and JPG, JPEG, PNG, and BMP images.
To use this personal document service you have to set up an email address. Each Kindle device receives its own custom address. But we will need to tell you from which address we will send the documents in order for you to accept them. From any device connected with a web browser we will Manage your content and devices. there we will go to Preferences > Personal Document Settings and we’ll add our email address if it’s not already on Email list of authorized personal documents.
Now we can send books and documents to Kindle by email with that authorized account. But, to what address do we send them? You will find the destination address in the Amazon Kindle itself, in Settings > All Settings > My Account > Send to Kindle Email. there you can send up to 25 documents at the same time that do not exceed 50MB total.