Even mighty Amazon has finally been forced to submit to the inexorable forces of the market:
Amazon quietly updated its help documentation to state that Kindle devices will start supporting EPUB files.
There’s a catch, though. “Beginning in late 2022, Send to Kindle applications will support EPUB (.EPUB) format,” says the document. This means you’ll be able to send EPUB files to your Kindle via Amazon’s handy Send to Kindle system, which essentially lets you upload documents to your Kindle by emailing them to your Kindle email address. It’s unclear, however, whether Kindles will natively support EPUB files, allowing you to purchase ebooks from Amazon’s library in the EPUB format directly.
This is a big deal for everyone who owns a Kindle and isn’t completely reliant on Amazon’s library. Until now, you had to manually convert EPUB files into MOBI (or another format) to load them onto your Kindle, and this often brought additional issues as the conversion wasn’t always perfect.
Also, the news is notable for the sheer fact that Amazon avoided supporting the otherwise widely supported EPUB format for nearly 15 years (EPUB is an open standard that originally launched in September 2007).
Additionally, Amazon’s document says that – also in late 2022 – its Send to Kindle system will stop supporting MOBI files (ironically, MOBI was Amazon’s long-preferred standard, and the company has its own version of MOBI called AZW).
It certainly took them long enough to accept the inevitable. But it’s a very powerful lesson in learning not to fight the market. It is said that the heart wants what it wants, regardless of what logic dictates, and the same is true of the market. The sooner any entrepreneur or business accepts this reality, the less likely it is to make unnecessary and unforced errors.