How to Convert E-Books to Work With Your Kindle for Free
The days when we all thought e-books would be a thing of the past are long gone – while e-books remain popular, people still love the feel of a printed book. But many book lovers have e-books, and a significant portion of them are Amazon Kindles. Amazon dominates the e-book market with a nearly 70 percent share , but if you live entirely in Amazon’s walled garden, you may not be aware of the existence of various e-book formats, with the EPUB and MOBI formats being the most popular and common. Amazon uses the proprietary AZW format and allows the MOBI format, but wants nothing to do with EPUB, which is the format used by Barnes & Noble Nook, Google Play, and Kobo, so any eBooks downloaded from those stores won’t work with the Kindle. . And many of the free e-books you find online — Project Gutenberg has thousands of them — are offered in EPUB format, which means your Kindle or Kindle app won’t even recognize them.
But if you have a bunch of EPUB books that you want to read on your Kindle, there are ways to easily convert them.
How to convert an EPUB file
If you have an EPUB file on your hard drive, you have two main options for converting it to the MOBI format that your Kindle will accept:
- Online. The EPUB Converter site allows you to download any EPUB file and it will return the MOBI file to you absolutely free. It’s as easy as clicking a few buttons on a website. There are two downsides: if the conversion is a bit wobbly, there are no settings to fiddle with, and it can sometimes take a long time for your converted file to get delivered to you.
- Caliber. Caliber is an e-book management application available for most major operating systems for free. It’s a pretty great program if you have a large ebook library and it comes with a solid conversion feature. No matter what format your eBook is in, Caliber can probably convert it to MOBI for you. If you want to keep it simple, add your EPUB book to the Caliber library, then select “Convert Books” and select MOBI as the output. But Caliber also lets you customize just about every aspect of the final product, from cover art to metadata, so you can also customize your shiny new MOBI file however you want. Once you’ve converted the file, you can save it to your computer or transfer it directly to your Kindle.
Delivery of your e-book
Now that you have your book in Kindle-friendly MOBI format, you need to transfer it to your Kindle or the Kindle app on your phone, tablet, or PC. The easiest way to do this is to email the eBook file to your Kindle . This book will automatically appear in your Kindle library, which is a pretty cool feature of the Kindle software.
If you have a physical Kindle device like the Paperwhite and don’t like the easy ways, you can also connect your Kindle to your computer via a USB cable. The Kindle will show up as a storage device and you can drag the newly created MOBI file onto it in the file manager.