Use Kindle as an Epub Reader?

If you obtain a book on the High Seas, is it safe to use Kindle as the Epub reader? Would it phone home to Amazon that you have an "otherwise obtained" book?

19 comments

Calibre is your friend.

Youre good! I use calibre to load ebooks from other sources to my kindle
- Same here, never had any problem.

You don't even need to connect your Kindle to the internet. Just keep it in airplane mode permanently and save the battery.
- Late to the thread, but it's worth saying how convenient it can be to find a book online and just email it to the kindle, no cables or arcane software wrangling needed.
  If you don't mind having a generic cover and occasional janky formatting, it feels like a bit of wizardry every time I track down something I want to read and it's there on my e-reader in a matter of minutes.
  This also applies to checking out titles from the library, assuming they're not wait-listed. Even after years of reading this way, it still tickles me whenever I can just pick a book and be reading it without getting out of my chair.

Yeah, amazon literally doesn't care. The only thing that ever goes wrong when you use Someone Else's epubs is it sometimes loses the cover art if you're connected to wifi. Nothing else ever happens

There's no real way for them to check even if they did care, there's tons of places to get epubs legitimately that would show up just the same as any legitimate methods

I use koreader for my kindles and it works like charm, for all books and documents extensions
https://github.com/koreader/koreader

I've been sending books to my Kindle email address for over a decade and never had an issue. Now that it supports epub it's even easier.

I do this, I use Calibre to upload it, or occasionally I use my Amazon email to send it to my kindle.

As I've never been sure about that, I always used kindles without wifi access and copied the books onto the device with calibre. I recently read about people sending their pirated books to the email adress amazon hands you to automatically copy files to the kindle, using a burner account i suppose, still those people have some balls lol.
- I've been doing this since I got the first kindle, some 7 years ago. Amazon doesn't really care and, unless DMCA comes, they won't ever.

I've been pirating ebooks on my Kindle Oasis for a couple years now, and they've never said anything. How would they even know you didn't buy it someplace else?

Phone home for sure since I suffered from the minor nuisance:
https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2020/05/28/kindles-how-to-fix-disappearing-book-covers-issue/
Easy fix in Calibre since just reconnect after the sync.
The bottomline is Amazon does not block side loaded epub/mobi.

How about using Apple's "Book" app on a Mac?
- Oh you mean kindle software as opposed to the tablet.
  In that case just use Calibre
  
  He means what was formerly called iBooks.

Just for clarity Kindles still don't support epubs but if you use their service they get automatically converted to a compatible format and then pushed to your device iirc.

19 comments