Amazon's Kindle will finally add ePub support

From the Kindle ‘jailbreak’ thread yesterday, i learned it’s not the kindle being able to read ePub natively, but instead amazon doing conversion of ePub to the format kindle can read

FTA

> the Send to Kindle function will convert ePub files to a format that can be opened on the e-reader.

Converting to their own proprietary format is not natively supporting Epub format. Also converting being more prone to errors, there will be unreadable ebooks more often than if the reader was supporting it natively.

Fun fact: you can already send ePubs to kindles, if you change the file extension to .png (a valid format that Amazon’s Kindle email service accepts).

This doesn’t seem to work in Apple Mail (it doesn’t treat image attachments as true file attachments seemingly and tries to add them inline into text, leading to Amazon telling you that you didn’t attach anything), but I got it to work today from Outlook.

Whatever the format, Amazon will be logging/tracking every single page click (as they do now).

Hopefully this means more reliable conversions between epub and AZW. Using various 3rd party tools for this up until now, I've nearly always ran into weird formatting issues - some very minor and some that made books almost unreadable.

The epub format is kind of garbage, but at least it's an open spec.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31213943 (3 days ago)

Finally! I have a VM set up for years with calibre to automatically convert epub to mobi and email them to my kindle.