Normally, Amazon Kindles will only read books published through Amazon.

In order to read an eBook published in the many other eBook Retailer Stores one had to use something like the truly fantastic program Calibre. Calibre will do far more than just convert books to Amazon format and it is worth checking out, but it is so powerful as a book catalogue and book editor that it can seem overpowering.

So, along comes this new feature from Amazon that allows you to email an ePub file to your Kindle account and have it appear perfectly in all your Kindle apps and machines.

Do, this . . .

Go to Amazon and look up your Kindle send-to-kindle email address. It is listed under Personal Document Settings in your Manage Content and Devices section of Amazon (just do a search and it should just pop up if you have never looked at your Kindle settings.)

Mine looks a bit like this “rg_(some random number)@kindle.com”

Go to where your book file is, probably in your downloads folder, and rename the bit after the Dot, or Period, from epub to png. If you are not sure about how to rename files it’s pretty easy to look up how to do it online — but the easiest way is to grab whichever random teenager, or elementary school student that happens to be around and have them do it. It really is easy.

So, Cobra Flight goes from “cobra_flight.epub: to “cobra_flight.png” (That’s not the real file name since I couldn’t be bothered digging around for it.)

Anyway, using your mail program, just send the file to your Kindle account by attaching it to the email. Kindle will do everything it needs and put it into your book library very quickly.

Another way is to use the “sendtokindle” app available in various forms at Amazon.

But don’t forget to rename that file before using the app or the mail program.

There is quite a fine article about all this at this website