The news that epub is now endorsed by Amazon may have made you come up with the idea that now is the best time to collect all your ebooks in one place or switch from your current ebook platform, for instance Kobo or Nook.
Does Kindle Support Epub Books
Amazon's Kindles are some of the best dedicated e-readers you can buy, but a longstanding criticism from users of DRM-free books from non-Amazon sources is that they don't support the open ePub standard. That has changed at some point in the recent past, as spotted by Good E-Reader: Amazon's Kindle Personal Documents Service will now accept ePub files sent to your device's Send to Kindle email address, the same way it currently handles PDF files, Word documents, and other image and text files.
But if Amazon really wanted to stick it to their competitors they could easily add ePub support to Kindles and dispel the notion that Kindles are a closed ecosystem that limits users to only books purchased from Amazon.
The EPUB format is the most widely supported e-book format, supported by most e-book readers except Amazon Kindle devices. Most e-book readers also support the PDF and plain text formats. E-book software can be used to convert e-books from one format to another, as well as to create, edit and publish e-books.
The Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) is an XML-based open standard published by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and maintained by the DAISY Consortium for people with print disabilities. DAISY has wide international support with features for multimedia, navigation and synchronization. A subset of the DAISY format has been adopted by law in the United States as the National Instructional Material Accessibility Standard (NIMAS), and K-12 textbooks and instructional materials are now required to be provided to students with disabilities.
Adobe Digital Editions uses .epub format for its e-books, with digital rights management (DRM) protection provided through their proprietary ADEPT mechanism. The ADEPT framework and scripts have been reverse-engineered to circumvent this DRM system.[4]
eReader is a freeware program for viewing Palm Digital Media electronic books which use the pdb format used by many Palm applications. Versions are available for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Palm OS (not webOS), Symbian, Windows Mobile Pocket PC/Smartphone, and macOS. The reader shows text one page at a time, as paper books do. eReader supports embedded hyperlinks and images. Additionally, the Stanza application for the iPhone and iPod Touch can read both encrypted and unencrypted eReader files.
The FictionBook format does not specify the appearance of a document; instead, it describes its structure and semantics. All the ebook metadata, such as the author name, title, and publisher, is also present in the ebook file. Hence the format is convenient for automatic processing, indexing, and ebook collection management. This also is convenient to store books in it for later automatic conversion into other formats.
The .ibooks format is created with the free iBooks Author ebook layout software from Apple Inc. This proprietary format is based on the EPUB standard, with some differences in the CSS tags used in an ibooks format file, this making it incompatible with the EPUB specification. The End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA) included with iBooks Author states that "If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple". The "through Apple" will typically be in the Apple Apple Books store. The EULA further states that "This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format." Therefore, Apple has not included distribution restrictions in the iBooks Author EULA for ibooks format ebooks created in iBooks Author that are made available for free, and it does not prevent authors from re-purposing the content in other ebook formats to be sold outside the iBookstore. This software currently supports import and export functionally for three formats. ibook, Plain text and PDF. Versions 2.3 and later of iBooks Author support importing EPUB and exporting EPUB 3.0.[13]
Because the ebooks bought on the Kindle are delivered over its wireless system called Whispernet, the user does not see the AZW files during the download process. The Kindle format is available on a variety of platforms, such as through the Kindle app for the various mobile device platforms.
The Amazon Kindle can read unprotected .mobi files, as can Amazon's Kindle application for Windows and MacOS. Amazon has also developed an .epub to .mobi converter called KindleGen,[21] and it supports IDPF 1.0 and IDPF 2.0 EPUB format.
All systems running the Newton operating system (the most common include the Newton MessagePads, eMates, Siemens Secretary Stations, Motorola Marcos, Digital Ocean Seahorses and Tarpons) have built-in support for viewing Newton books, through a system service known as Newton Book Reader. The Newton package format was released to the public by Newton, Inc. prior to that company's absorption into Apple Computer. The format is thus arguably open and various people have written readers for it (writing a Newton book converter has even been assigned as a university-level class project[25]).
Newton books have no support for DRM or encryption. They do support internal links, potentially multiple tables of contents and indexes, embedded gray scale images, and even some scripting capability using NewtonScript (for example, it's possible to make a book in which the reader can influence the outcome).[26] Newton books utilize Unicode and are thus available in numerous languages. An individual Newton Book may actually contain multiple views representing the same content in different ways (such as for different screen resolutions).
The first e-books in history were in plain text (.txt) format, supplied for free by the Project Gutenberg community, but the format itself existed before the e-book era. The plain text format doesn't support digital rights management (DRM) or formatting options (such as different fonts, graphics or colors), but it has excellent portability as it is the simplest e-book encoding possible as a plain text file contains only ASCII or Unicode text (text files with UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding are also popular for languages other than English). Almost all operating systems can read ASCII text files (e.g. Unix, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS and other systems) and newer operating systems support Unicode text files as well. The only potential for portability problems of ASCII text files is that operating systems differ in their preferred line ending convention and their interpretation of values outside the ASCII range (their character encoding). Conversion of files from one to another line-ending convention is easy with free software. DOS and Windows uses CRLF, Unix and Apple's OS X use LF, Mac OS up to and including OS 9 uses CR. By convention, lines are often broken to fit into 80 characters, a legacy of older terminals and consoles. Alternately, each paragraph may be a single line.
The TomeRaider e-book format is a proprietary format. There are versions of TomeRaider for Windows, Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC), Palm, Symbian and iPhone. Capabilities of the TomeRaider3 e-book reader vary considerably per platform: the Windows and Windows Mobile editions support full HTML and CSS. The Palm edition supports limited HTML (e.g., no tables, no fonts), and CSS support is missing. For Symbian there is only the older TomeRaider2 format, which does not render images or offer category search facilities. Despite these differences any TomeRaider e-book can be browsed on all supported platforms. The Tomeraider website[31] claims to have over 4000 e-books available, including free versions of the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia.
Adobe Digital Editions should recognize the Fire as a reader (it might not say Fire it might show some kind of model number). With ADE open in library view see if the Fire shows up below where it says recently read on the left side of the screen. If it does you can drag and drop the books from within ADE.
@Jane: Jane, I followed these wonderful instructions to the letter (thank you) but found there was no books folder listed when I opened the Mantano app on my laptop. Somehow I was able to get the books into Mantano but they will not open. They have no covers and seem to be locked. The Mantano app will tell me to okay Adobe DRM. I have done this but when I attempt to open the books, it tells me again I need to okay Adobe DRM. It just goes in a cycle of that. I can see the books but the covers did not load, nor will they open. I am at a loss as to what to do now. I even went to Adobe Digital editions and unregistred and re-registered, hoping that would make the Adobe DRM request on the Fire stop asking me to okay DRM but it does not.
@Brian: Brian, yes I did re-download the books. Mantano does show as registered for Adobe DRM in its settings menu, however, when I click to open the book, it says the device is not registered for DRM when I know that it is. I have un-registered and re-registered the device several times. The books are sitting in ADE on my laptop but now when I click them, they say the license is already registered to another user so they will not open on my laptop. There is no other user but me so that has me confused as well.
While Amazon no longer supports the Mobi format for new and updated reflowable (aka, where you can customize fonts, etc.) ebooks in the Mobi format, existing ebooks in the Mobi format are still readable by the Kindle. Attach the file to an email, send it to your Kindle's email address (with any subject, and nothing in the body of the email), and it should appear on your Kindle shortly. You can also drag and drop the file onto your Kindle if you attach the device to your PC with a USB cable. 2ff7e9595c
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