Your Kindle isn’t restricted to reading books from Amazon. Here’s how to send other ebook formats to your ereader, and how to get free ebooks during Stuff Your Kindle Days this week.
The Amazon Kindle is a great ebook reader, but it’s tightly tied to Amazon’s ecosystem. If you have a Fire tablet or a smartphone, you can download other e-reading apps to beef up your library, but with the Kindle hardware, you’re pretty much tied to getting your content directly from Amazon. Well, sort of. Using a bit of free software, you can take ebooks in a variety of formats and zap them over to your Kindle. And on Oct. 22 and 24, Amazon is offering up a number of romance- and mystery-themed freebies via its Stuff Your Kindle Days. Here’s how to get started.Upload Via ‘Send to Kindle’
Amazon offers a Send to Kindle page where you can upload ebook files saved on your device. On amazon.com/sendtokindle, click Select files from device and select the book you want on your Kindle. This tool supports PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, RTF, HTM, HTML, PNG, GIF, JPG, JPEG, BMP, and EPUB formats on ebooks up to 200MB in size. (Amazon no longer supports sending new Mobi files.) A status bar will appear, letting you keep tabs on the upload. When it’s ready, you’ll see a checkmark and an In library notice.
Amazon also has an app for Windows and macOS that lets you do the same thing, as does a Chrome extension, though results are mixed on the latter.Send Ebooks to the Kindle From Your Phone
If you have the Kindle app installed on your iPhone or Android device, you can add ebooks to your library with a few taps. In the example above, we downloaded an ebook from Project Gutenberg on the iPhone, which saved it to the Files app. We then long-pressed on the ebook, selected Share, and picked the Kindle app in the menu. It then appeared in our library in the Kindle app as well as on our Kindle Paperwhite.
