How to send books to your Kindle — even if they’re not from Amazon
Amazon’s Kindle is a useful reading tool, especially if you tend to purchase your books through Amazon. If you have ebooks that you’ve purchased elsewhere, however — or have picked up off a free service such as Project Gutenberg — you need to be able to put it on your Kindle (or Kindle app).
Getting a non-Amazon book onto a Kindle used to be a somewhat awkward process, involving attaching it to an email and sending it to your individual Kindle email address. However, Amazon’s Send to Kindle service has improved vastly since then, and it is now a fairly simple process.
But first, a note: if you’re a long-term Kindle user who hasn’t been paying attention to the news, you may be surprised to see ePub listed — and not Mobi. Amazon added ePub to its list of allowed Kindle formats about a year ago and, around that same time, announced that it was retiring its long-used Mobi format. But while, according to the company, you can no longer send new Mobi documents to your Kindle, existing documents will not be affected.
And you’re done! When I tried it, it took under a minute for the book to appear in my Android Kindle app. While this could vary, you shouldn’t have to wait long.
As previously noted, you don’t have to use the online app to send your document to your Kindle — on the right side of the page are various buttons that, when clicked, will offer instructions on how to send documents to your Kindle account via a mobile app, email, or various other methods.
Sending via email offers an extra added attraction: if you don’t want to struggle with trying to read a PDF on your phone (which, depending on the file, can be a real headache), you can use email to convert the PDF to a more readable format on your Kindle app. We’ve got instructions on how to do that here.
