Nearly 15 years after the launch of the first Kindle device, Amazon is now adding support for the widely used e-book format, ePub.
This eliminates the need for manually converting ePub files to something that’s readable by Amazon’s Kindle devices, which the users are doing for years. Also, Amazon is removing support for the MOBI files, which are also depicted with AZW extensions. These changes will be coming to Kindle Store later this year.
Amazon Kindle Supporting ePub Books
One of the many ventures Amazon is in, books are something that the company has a special place for. After all, it’s how the company started with Jeff Bezos, by selling books online. And a decade later, Amazon unveiled a dedicated device for reading eBooks, named Kindle.
Since then, Amazon has become one of the largest eBook publishers, housing millions of eBooks today. Yet, it doesn’t support the widely used eBook format – ePub! But this is changing, as Amazon updated the Kindle Store to add support for reading ePub books directly within the devices.
To date, users are forced to use third-party services like Calibre for converting the eBooks with ePub extension to something that’s supported by Kindle devices (doc, pdf, Mobi, RTF, HTML, etc).
But, this isn’t necessary from now on. As spotted by Good E-Reader, Amazon will let users read ePub file books directly on the Kindle devices soon, without needing them to be converted. This update is likely to come in late 2022. Aside from this, Amazon is dumping support for MOBI files!
MOBI files are something that’s coming from Mobipocket, a company acquired by Amazon back in 2005, and rebranded the MOBI extension to AZW. This is an old French format still used by Amazon in its Kindle ebooks. So soon, users cannot read new eBooks with the .azw extension, while the existing ones are still supported.
