Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels

Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by WorldMaker on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @02:53PM (#31426302)

After a certain OS version kindles all support plain (DRM-free) ePub files just fine, Amazon just has yet to update their "Send to Kindle" tools (both the Windows File Explorer extension tool and the "email to an amazon email address you setup" tool) to allow the .epub extension, but you can copy the files directly over USB and there are silly workarounds like renaming from .epub to something the tools do recognize. There's file extensions they will load just fine under.

The interesting question is why if the systems support ePub, Amazon doesn't update the "Send to Kindle" tools to also support the extension? Those tools support .doc, .txt, .pdf, and other random things, just explicitly not .epub. It could just be that those tools are low maintenance and don't update often in general. Maybe it's simply as sinister as they don't want people to know kindles support ePubs, even though they do (because they have to) and the "Send to Kindle" tools are the primary interface people use for "what does my kindle support?" as very few users bother to directly USB their kindles and rely on wifi updates.

It's strange.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by WorldMaker on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @04:59PM (#31427581)

Read the article: apparently the good news is that the "Send to Kindle" tools are announced to support .epub file extensions directly soon. The article makes the assumption that "Send to Kindle" will be reformatting .epub files to Kindle native formats and uses that assumption as the basis to rant about the Kindle native formats, but anecdata (such as the USB support and file rename workaround) again suggest kindles already support ePub well enough and that assumption may not be valid and "Send to Kindle" may not wind up reformatting ePub files (much).

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