How to Send an Epub eBook to Your Kindle by Email

Amazon offers a free conversion service where you can send documents to your Kindle, but there is a problem: it doesn't work with Epub files.

Even though there are services you can use to automatically send DRM-free files to your Kindle account from Dropbox and other cloud services, Amazon still won't let you send an Epub file to your Kindle.

Fortunately, there are several work-arounds.

How to Send an Epub eBook to Your Kindle by Email calibre Kindle (platform) Tips and Tricks

Your first option is to use a website like Send Epub to Kindle.

Send Epub to Kindle

This site will let you upload an Epub file and provide your email address, after which it will convert the ebook into a Kindle format and send the ebook to your Kindle account.

  • Pro: It's the easiest option.
  • Con: Do you really want to trust your ebook to a site you don't know?

If your answer to that question is no then there are other options.

Send a ZIP File

For example, eReader Palace brings our attention to the fact that you can send a ZIP file to your Kindle account. In other words, you can rename the Epub file by giving it a ZIP suffix and then email the ZIP file to your Kindle account.

Yes, that does work - to a limited degree. I've tried it, and I found that Amazon will accept the ZIP file only if you have fewer than 25 files in the ZIP file. This means that Amazon will reject more complex Epub files if they are made of too many parts.

If that happens then your next best option will be to use calibre to convert the ebook so you can send it to your Kindle account.

Calibre

The ebook library tool calibre is fully capable of converting your ebook to and from Kindle, Epub, and other ebook formats. This tool can even email your documents directly to your Kindle account.

I have never used that feature, though, so I can't tell you how well it works.

Addendum

The reason I have never used calibre's email feature is that I keep a copy of my ebook files in both Kindle and Epub, and I send the Kindle file to my Kindle account whenever I want to upload an ebook to my Kindle account.

It's just less hassle that, way, in my opinion.

Do you have a preferred method for sending Epub ebooks to your Kindle account? Let us know in the comments!

image by Jamais Cascio

 

About Nate Hoffelder (9920 Articles)
Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

4 Comments on How to Send an Epub eBook to Your Kindle by Email

  1. I have used calibre to email documents directly to your Kindle account. It needs to be given email account access and it uses that to email to the Kindle address. It works fine.

  2. That is cool about renaming to .zip. Probably not too difficult to create a script to reduce number of files to 25. But by then one might as well use calibre. I’d always assumed .zip was for image archives (comic books etc.), and that there was no limit on number of files. Does the limit apply only to .html, or to any type of file?

    online-convert.com will let you upload an .epub (or pick something from Dropbox or Google Drive) and convert it to ‘.azw’, which then downloads to your computer where you could use Send To Kindle; no need to provide email address.

    There are mobile apps for this as well (on iOS, ‘The Ebook Converter’ for example). Once the converted file is generated, you can email it to the send to kindle address, or Open With… Kindle app.

  3. I add my Dutch e-books, which are sold as epub without DRM, to calibre, convert them to azw3, and sideload (through a USB cable) the azw3 to my kindle with calibre. Works perfectly on my kindles (basic kindle & kindle paperwhite). The azw3 may not always look completely identical to the epub, but it will be a good imitation.
    E-mailing to your kindle account has the advantage that the book is safely stored in your kindle cloud. But as far as I know, you can’t e-mail azw3 files to a kindle account. You can e-mail azw and mobi formats, but in my experience you lose quality when converting epub to mobi, sometimes a lot. I’ve never used azw, but as it’s an older format much like mobi, I think it’ll lose quality too.
    If you really want to have the best of both worlds (storage in kindle cloud and azw3), you could try to convert to mobi with the mobi output settings in calibre to “both” or “new” which should create a mobi file that can be sent to the cloud and is as good as an azw3, but calibre warns “various kindle devices have trouble displaying the new or both mobi filetypes. If you wish to use the new format on your device, convert to azw3 instead of mobi.” But it might work for you.

  4. i found a website that could convert and send files directly to your kindle

    https://uptokindle.com/

2 Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. Why Amazon Doesn't Add ePub Support to the Kindle | The Digital Reader
  2. Here's a Nifty Hack for Sending Your Epub eBooks to Kindle Without Conversion | The Digital Reader

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