BERLIN: The world of ebooks can roughly be divided into two camps: Amazon and everything else. The division all comes down to the digital format the books are sold in.

While Kindle most ebooks bought from Amazon can’t legally be converted for reading on ereaders from other manufacturers, the ebooks sold by all other providers in Epub format, on the other hand, can be converted into Kindle format.

The procedure required for this wasn’t exactly painless, however, and you first needed to install the open-source program Calibre, a management and digital library software for people who read ebooks.

But Amazon has now finally announced that it will convert any Epub-format books you have into the Kindle format for you, so long as the files are not protected by digital rights management (DRM).

Although it falls short of native support for the ereader industry’s most widely supported format, the new feature marks a significant break with Amazon’s reluctance to recognise this file type ever since the beginnings of both Kindles and Epubs in 2007.

To send your Epubs to your Kindle, you can now email any DRM-free Epub books to a specific email address assigned to your Kindle reader, according to instructions on an updated Amazon help page.

The new function is called ‘Send to Kindle’, and your Kindle reader has a Send to Kindle email address which can be found in your Amazon customer account.

This method also works with text documents (doc, rtf, txt), PDFs, web pages (HTML), image files (jpeg, gif, png, nmp) and ebooks in Mobi format. However, Mobi support is scheduled to end at the end of 2022. Mobi books already loaded into the Kindle library will remain readable beyond that date.

Those who want to can also use the new Send to Kindle app instead of email to get various files onto their Kindle. App support for Epub books will begin at the end of 2022, Amazon says.

 - dpa