Way back in May, Amazon announced that they were going to support the EPUB format on Kindle devices and in the Kindle app, and discontinue support for the Mobipocket (MOBI) format. This was terrific news, because MOBI files have always been a huge pain in the neck, and EPUB has been the industry standard for a long time. However, the key piece that was needed was an update to Amazon’s Send to Kindle apps, which have always been one of the main ways to get third-party ebooks onto a Kindle device (or into the Kindle app). At the time, Amazon said that update would come “later this year.”
Well, today, December 22, 2022, was the day it finally happened, with the release of Send to Kindle version 1.1.1.254. If you open the Send to Kindle app on your Mac or PC, it should offer to update itself automatically; you can also download the Mac or Windows version of the app directly. Once you have the new version of the app installed, you can drag EPUB files onto it to send them to your Kindle.
Since Amazon now fully supports the EPUB format, and is actively phasing out support for MOBI, there’s no longer any reason for us to distribute MOBI files, so we’re discontinuing them immediately. Existing MOBI files already on your Kindle will continue to work just fine, but from now on, if you want to put a Take Control book on your Kindle, use the EPUB format instead. Order confirmation emails, our Library page, and other places where MOBI files were formerly available will now just offer PDF (plain and zipped) and EPUB.
Being able to use EPUB everywhere solves a lot of problems for us, but one mildly annoying issue is that the Send to Kindle app still has a 50 MB file size limit, and a few of our EPUBs are larger than that. Fortunately, there’s a simple alternative: using the Send to Kindle webpage, which has a generous 200 MB file size limit. I’ve updated the Kindle topic on our Device Advice page to include all this information and much more.