With this measure, We can officially welcome Kindle to the 21st century. I know it sounds a bit exaggerated, okay, but for some reason that no one fully understands, this news, which should have occurred sometime in the last years of the first decade of this century, has been delayed for about 15 years. What’s more, it shouldn’t have been news, because it should have been born that way, but the reality has been very different.
And it is that, Until now, the Kindle family has not supported the EPUB format.which has forced many users with books in this format to have to convert them to MOBI, the format that Amazon has traditionally used, and that despite its attempts in this regard (perhaps the only reason that we can infer behind its policies with formats), it has never become the standard when it comes to talking about books in electronic format.
A) Yes, It seems that Amazon has finally decided to side with reality and, in a rather discreet movement, since they have not issued any communication in this regard, they have reversed this historical anomaly. Thus, as we can read in the Amazon Help and Customer Service Center, EPUB has already been added to the list of formats compatible with readers, both physical and digital, Amazon Kindle, adding to those that were previously compatible.
But the changes never come alone, and in this case the second novelty in this regard is almost as surprising as the first, and that is that Kindle will stop supporting new MOBI files later this year. This is what we can read about it on their website
Note: Starting in late 2022, you will no longer be able to send MOBI files (.AZW, .MOBI) to the library through the Kindle Personal Document Service. This change will not affect any MOBI files that are already in your Kindle library. MOBI is an older file format and does not support the new Kindle for Documents features.
The good news, as you can read in that warning, is that all titles in MOBI format that users already have in their libraries will continue to work and being accessible normally, which makes us think that, at some point, the service will already have included from the inside out some conversion system to another format. However, I admit that this change in Kindle’s policy regarding MOBI and, especially, EPUB, is surprising to me.
This is what the list of formats supported by Kindle looks like today:
- MOBI (.AZW, .MOBI) (no longer supports newer Kindle features)
- Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
- HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
- RTF (.RTF)
- Text (.TXT)
- JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
- GIF (.GIF)
- PNG (.PNG)
- BMP (.BMP)
- PDF (.PDF)
- EPUB (.EPUB)