If you’ve ever downloaded free ebooks, you’ll often find them in an ePub format. Unfortunately, Kindle doesn’t support ePub files.
Having downloaded today’s free ebooks, I ran into that exact problem (of course a few hours later, I realized they were available straight from Amazon — doh!).
So, after a quick search on Google, I found an ebook conversion tool that’s available for Windows, OSX and Linux.
But, did it work?
Calibre
After you download and install Calibre, it takes you a simple setup. Be sure to select your “generic” device!
Is this a good place for my library? Default settings will do, I suppose. After all, I prefer using my Kindle app to manage my library, I just want to use Calibre to convert.
This is a cool feature! You can send converted books (and those you keep in the Calibre library, if you chose to use Calibre for ebook management) straight to your device!
WOOT! Easy!
Calibre is ugly, but at least it’s free and multiplatform!
Simple click on the “Add books” to add your the ePub (or any other file format you’re converting) books you want to convert:
Make your selection and click, “Convert books.”
Easy, right?
Calibre has an impressive number of options, including the number of “convert to” options:
After converting the three ePub files to mobi, you can sort your ebook library by format. So, if you have a Kindle and another ebook reader, you could potentially manage both libraries at once.
After you’ve made the conversion, you can email it to your Kindle, send to a device or save it to disk.
I chose to save to disk and added them to my Kindle app, since I wanted to have a copy on my local machine to read, anyway.
Conclusion
When an app is free, you automatically give it some grace. So, despite the fact this is an extremely cluttered app, I highly recommend using Calibre for converting your ebooks. It was easy to setup and worked like a charm.
You can learn more about Calibre and download it for free on the Calibre website.
Joanna says
I love Calibre. I use it a lot to convert PDF books from academic publishers that put their books online in PDF format for free (like intechopen.com and oapen.org). While the kindle can read PDF files, font sizes are often a problem so converting them can make them a lot more readable.
Chris Coppenbarger says
You realize all three of the Francis Chan books were free on Amazon.com too, right? That’s where I downloaded them from. I didn’t see them on Christianaudio.com. Could’ve saved you some trouble in conversion. All three books are now on my phone.
Adam shields says
I use Calibre. Very good software and updated frequently. One thing to note is that Amazon allows you save your own books to the amazon library. So you do not need to store them on you own computer
Eric Dye says
Yes! And I love it. These automatically were dropped on my Kindle via wifi in a matter of seconds — love it!
Raoul Snyman says
You know that if you plug your Kindle into your computer, you can send the files directly to your Kindle, you don’t need to e-mail them… at least, that’s what we do on Linux 😉
Adam Shields says
If you email them then they will be stored on Amazon’s library system. If you move them via usb, they won’t be stored. I like to keep a backup (and then I can download them and sync them with other devices).
Eric Dye says
FYI: Adam is an Amazon Kindle pro. #fact
Honestly, if I ever had a question about ebooks that I couldn’t Google within the first page of search results, I would contact Adam immediately.
Eric Dye says
Well, yeah, but that means I would have to go find the cord 😉
Bragg says
Calibre is the really a good one to convert the manuscript into different digital document. However, some complex manuscripts must need the manual conversion. Anyway, thanks for your great tutorial..
Eric Dye says
Thanks! 😀