After 15 years Amazon decides to give the Kindle (partial) support for ePub ebooks

Ebook lovers, rejoice, Amazon has (albeit reluctantly) finally started to embrace the ebook format ePub. Starting in late 2022, changes to the Send to Kindle feature will introduce the option for users to send ePub files to their devices.

The Kindle lineup has long been the staple in the e-reader market. While Amazon’s product has reaped profound success, there has always been one major flaw that has been, seemingly on purpose, never addressed.

We are of course referring to the Kindle’s lack of support for ePub. One has to admit that it simply makes little sense for the most common e-reader (in terms of market share) to not support the most common ebook file type.

It should be noted that this update does not mean that the Kindle will suddenly now offer native support for ePub per se. The ePub files, before being sent to the device, will actually be converted to another format. Kindle devices will still be unable to read ePub files directly.

Nevertheless, Amazon seems to have finally accepted that, despite its dominance on the e-reader market, sometimes following the crowd is more beneficial than paving a whole new road all by yourself.

For more than a decade, Amazon dogmatically tried to push users to stick to MOBI, their proprietary standard. This oftentimes meant that a lot of content was virtually inaccessible directly by the average Kindle user.

From subscriptions to online newspapers to more niche books that are not available on Amazon, there is a lot of content out there that simply is not available in a MOBI format. Therefore, Kindle users had to manually convert ebook files using third-party software. The former is, admittedly, not that difficult but remains a hassle nonetheless.

Luckily, these days will soon be long gone. What is even more exciting is that this might be the first step towards abandoning the dated MOBI format altogether. Perhaps one day we could finally have a Kindle that has the best features, in addition to the best market share.