Getting an EPUB onto your Kindle
Amazon accepts EPUB files directly now. It converts them to its own internal format on their side, which means you no longer need to produce a MOBI, and in fact you cannot: Amazon stopped accepting MOBI for personal documents in 2022.
There are four routes onto the device. They differ in effort, in whether the book syncs across your devices, and in whether Amazon keeps a copy.
The web uploader
The simplest method, and the one to use if you are doing this once. Open the Send to Kindle page in a browser, sign in with the account your Kindle is registered to, and drop the EPUB in. Pick the destination device and it arrives in a minute or two.
The address is your own Amazon domain followed by /sendtokindle, so which one you want depends on the marketplace your account belongs to:
- India: amazon.in/sendtokindle
- United States: amazon.com/sendtokindle
- United Kingdom: amazon.co.uk/sendtokindle
- Germany: amazon.de/sendtokindle, and the same pattern for every other marketplace.
If the page loads but the device list is empty, you are almost certainly signed in to a different marketplace from the one your Kindle is registered to. Accounts are per-marketplace, and the uploader only shows devices belonging to the account you are signed in as.
The book goes into your Kindle library and syncs across devices, including reading position and highlights. Amazon stores a copy in your account, which is a convenience or a privacy consideration depending on what you are reading.
Email to your device address
Every Kindle has an email address ending in kindle.com. You can find it under Manage Your Content and Devices, in the Preferences or Devices section of your Amazon account.
Two rules trip people up. The sending address has to be on your Approved Personal Document Email List, in the same settings area, or Amazon silently discards the message. And attachments have a size limit, so a large illustrated book may bounce.
The subject line does not need to say anything, though writing Convert in it used to force a format conversion. That is no longer needed for EPUB.
The desktop and mobile apps
Send to Kindle exists as a desktop application for Windows and macOS, and on phones you can share a file to the Kindle app. Both are worth installing if you sideload regularly, because they add a right-click or share-sheet route and remove the sign-in step.
On a Mac you can also drag files onto the Send to Kindle app icon.
USB, and when to prefer it
Connect the Kindle by cable, and it mounts as a drive. Copy the EPUB into the documents folder, eject, and it appears on the device.
This is the one method where the file never touches Amazon. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored in your account, and nothing syncs. If you converted a document precisely because you did not want it leaving your machine, sending it to Amazon afterwards rather defeats the exercise, and USB is the consistent choice.
The tradeoff is real though: no cross-device sync, no cloud backup, and the book is gone if you reset the device.
If the book arrives looking wrong
A book that arrives with no cover thumbnail has a metadata problem rather than a transfer problem, and it is worth reading about the cover declaration separately.
A book with no working table of contents was converted from a PDF with no real heading structure to read. Nothing on the Kindle side can recover chapter boundaries that were never marked.
A book where every paragraph runs together, or where words are split oddly, came out of a PDF whose text layer is positioned glyph by glyph. That is a conversion quality problem, and the fix is at the conversion step, not the transfer step.