No, your Kindle is not only good for reading Amazon books. Although the platform has it very well assembled so that you can live only from its structured and extensive library, the truth is that in your electronic reader you can also put other external books . And today we are going to show you how to do it.
Amazon Kindle, the e-reader par excellence
We have said it many times but we never tire of repeating it: the Kindle is undoubtedly the ebook reader par excellence . It is true that there are alternatives to the Amazon e-book , but Jeff Bezos’s company has known how to sell its product like no other, making it the brand that comes to mind first when you think about buying a device of this type.
Over time, the Kindle have also been perfected. From the first generation to the present there are many generations in between in which the equipment has been lightening its body, simplifying its design and improving the quality of its screen or battery, while also adding complementary functions of all kinds ( from the different screen settings to features such as the Vocabulary Review).
Such is the popularity of the device, that if you have one to read e-books at the moment, there is a good chance that it is precisely a Kindle. And if so, our guide for today interests you a lot, since in it we explain how to put books that do not come directly from Amazon in it .
Kindle Compatible Formats
The first thing you have to be clear about before starting to pass books like a madman is that there are different formats for documents and electronic books (yes, just like for photos, there is JPG, TIFF or BMP, to name just three of them ).
When it comes to talking about ebooks for the Kindle, there is a good list of formats compatible with the computer:
- KFX: Amazon proprietary format. It is the most recent developed by the company (native) for its Kindle.
- AZW3: Also known as Kindle Format 8 (KF8). Another more proprietary format from Amazon.
- AZW : Same as above but for older Kindle generations.
- MOBI: an open standard format. It was bought by Amazon so Kindle can read it without problem as long as it does not have DRM protection.
- PDF: Your Kindle also reads PDF. The problem is that it is a format that does not always “mock up” well on the Kindle screen. If you have an alternative, we recommend avoiding it when reading books.
- PRC: it is an eBook format created by Mobipocket that is also compatible with the Amazon reader.
- Other Formats : The popular TXT, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP formats are also supported on your Kindle.
And what about the ePUB?
It is likely that in the previous list you were looking for the famous ePUB format. It will probably sound familiar to you because it is a very popular format in which many electronic books are found when downloading them.
Well, the Kindle are not compatible with this format. This is one of the reasons that leads the owners of this device to look for a way to convert their ePub books to a format compatible with the equipment. And how is this done? Well, with tools like the free Caliber.
Converting Books to a Kindle Compatible Format
When it comes to converting documents to a Kindle-compatible format, Caliber is possibly the most popular and widely used program out there. The reason? That it is quite simple to use (although it has a thousand options, do not be scared) and above all that it is 100% free.
You just have to go to its official website, look for the program (suitable for both Mac and Windows and Linux), download and install it. Once up and running on your computer, you are ready to convert and put “incompatible” books on your Kindle in just a few clicks.
The most likely situation is that you have downloaded a book in ePUB format and now you want to put it on your Kindle, so we will start from this assumption to explain the steps to follow :
- Connect your Kindle to your laptop or PC and open Caliber.
- You will see that the program automatically detects your Kindle upon startup. It is important that you do so to proceed with the transfer.
- Import the EPUB book you have into Caliber by pressing the “Add books” button (the green book with the +). You can also drag it directly from the folder you have it to the main screen.
- Click the right mouse button over the book that you want to transfer to your Kindle. An options menu will open.
- Find ‘Send to device’ and then choose ‘Send to main memory’ .
- Caliber will convert the default ebook to MOBI (a format supported by the Kindle) and it will appear on your device in a matter of seconds.
That easy. It is also choosing the specific output format you want for your Kindle. In this case, when selecting Send to device, choose “Send specific format to” and then “Main memory”. The different formats to which you can convert the file will appear before passing it on to the reader. Touch the one you want and click on accept. The book will still be sent to the Kindle in the desired format.
Sending a Book to the Kindle without Caliber
From Windows Explorer
If you already have a file created by yourself or bought in an online store that is compatible with Kindle (that is, it is in one of the formats that we have mentioned in the previous section), you can copy it directly to the internal memory of the Kindle without having to go through Caliber if you have a computer with Windows operating system .
The procedure is pretty easy. Connect the Kindle to your computer using the USB cable. After a few seconds, you will be able to access the internal memory of your device. You simply have to paste your compatible ebooks into the Documents folder . As simple as that. This trick can also help you if you want to make a backup of your Kindle. In that case, you will only have to copy the Documents folder and paste it on your desktop, for example.
Using Send to Kindle
Send to Kindle is a utility offered by Amazon itself and that allows you to easily send books to the reading device from a PC or Mac . We will have to download the executable depending on whether our computer is a Windows PC or a Mac. Once that is done, we will execute it and it will be installed. The program will ask us to log into our Amazon account. Once that is done, we can drag and drop any compatible file and it will be automatically sent to our Kindle. The program is a few years old and is only in English, but for now it is still working properly.