Amazon Kindles finally support the ebooks everyone else sells, sort of

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge

The report from Good E-Reader seemed to suggest something crazy. After 15 years, Amazon was going to support the ePub ebook format used by most online bookstores, publishers, and competing services. Amazon isn't going to support the ePub format. According to an update to Send to Kindle documentation, the Amazon Kindle will soon support using the Send to Kindle function to convert ePub files into an Amazon-specific digital book file format.

We were very close. We have been close since the launch of the ePub file format and the Kindle back in 2007. Sony, Barnes & Noble, and other e-reader makers supported the primary technical standard for the International Digital Publishing Forum. .Mobi, which Amazon acquired along with a French company in 2005, and.AZW, which is an Amazon- branded version of.Mobi, were supported by Amazon.

For the last 15 years, if you wanted to put an ePub file on your E-reader, you had to first convert it, usually using the very powerful but very frustrating and ugly Calibre software. Over the last few years it has become more and more annoying.

Publishers are now selling their books directly to consumers, often for less than other retailers. Smaller publishers have made it something of a selling point as they can sometimes give authors a larger piece of a sale from the publisher than they can from a larger digital bookseller. You still need to do the Calibre step if you want to get those ebook files on an e-reader from one of the wide range of e-readers coming out of China.

It will be easier to get an ePub on a Kindle. If you want to send an ePub file to your Kindle, you should use the Send to Kindle function. An ePub is not really an ePub because it is only supported by Amazon's Kindles.

I don't know about you, but I feel like Amazon is putting up a big glass wall between me and the content in order to keep me from forgetting the Amazon experience. Which is one of the reasons I love the tablets. I don't have to worry about jumping through hoops to put the ePub on the tablet.