I maintain a DRM-free backup of most of my Kindle books, so if I ever want to abandon the platform altogether, the books I bought will come with me to wherever is next. Federico Viticci’s Club MacStories offers long articles in epub format as well.Īlso, if you’re not a fan of DRM on ebooks, you might be interested to know that there’s a plug-in for Calibre that lets you remove the DRM from books and then convert them to other formats. When I get the voter packet for the Hugo Awards every year, it tends to include some epub versions of nominated novels. I was able to convert those files and upload them to Amazon, and then download them and read them at my leisure. For example, the hardcover of Lois McMaster Bujold’s book Cryoburn comes with a CD full of epub versions of past novels in the series. To open the book in the Finder, right-click on the book in the Library and choose Open Containing Folder.Īt this point, I open Amazon’s Send to Kindle app, which lets me add files to any of my registered Kindles and store them in Amazon’s cloud library for future access. Once that wheel stops spinning, your book has been converted. (From this window, you can also apply changes to the book’s settings-for example, you can force text to be aligned left rather than justified, and the Kindle will honor this choice!)Ĭalibre will begin converting the book, and you’ll see a spinning circle in the bottom-right corner of the window next to the “Jobs” label. Converting is a multi-step process: First select the book in the Calibre library window, then click on the Convert Books item in the app’s toolbar, choose a new output format from the pop-up menu in the top right corner (I choose MOBI), and click OK. You can add a book to the Calibre library by dragging it in. Instead, I use it to convert books into different formats.

While Calibre fancies itself a sort of iTunes for ebooks, I don’t use it as a catalog. It’s a program that’s hard to love, because it’s a cross-platform open-source project and it really shows in the interface. So when I get an epub book I’d like to read, I need to convert that book before I can load it on my Kindle.įor this (and many other ebook related tasks), I use the free tool Calibre. Instead, Kindle supports the Mobipocket format and its Kindle-specific AZW successors. I like reading books on my Kindle, but one of the drawbacks of the Kindle platform is that it doesn’t support the epub book format. Warning: This story has not been updated in several years and may contain out-of-date information. Calibre: How I put epub books on my Kindle

Calibre app for books