Three ways to get an EPUB onto your Kindle
The web uploader, the email address and the USB cable. Which to use, the size limits, and the setup step that catches everyone out.
You’ve got an EPUB. Getting it onto the device takes about a minute, once you know which of the three routes you want.
1. The Send to Kindle web page
Easiest, and where you should start.
- Go to amazon.com/sendtokindle and sign in.
- Drag the EPUB onto the page.
- Choose which devices should receive it.
- Send.
It turns up in your library within a couple of minutes and syncs to every Kindle and Kindle app on the account. Nothing to install. Files can be up to 200 MB.
2. Email to your Kindle address
Better if you do this often, or you’re on a phone.
Every Kindle account has an address ending in @kindle.com. Find yours under
Manage Your Content and Devices → Preferences → Personal Document Settings, or
straight from
Amazon’s content and devices page.
Here’s the bit everyone misses. On that same settings page there’s an Approved Personal Document E-mail List. Amazon quietly bins anything sent from an address that isn’t on it. No bounce, no warning. Add the address you’ll be sending from before you send anything, or you’ll be staring at an empty library wondering what you did wrong.
After that, just email the EPUB to your @kindle.com address as an attachment.
Subject and body get ignored. Amazon’s
email limits
are 50 MB per message across up to 25 attachments, and up to 15 approved sender
addresses.
3. USB cable, via Calibre
This is the only route where the book never reaches Amazon, and it takes one more
step than you’d expect. A Kindle can’t open an EPUB by itself. Amazon’s
Paperwhite spec lists AZW3, AZW, TXT, PDF,
MOBI and PRC as the formats it reads natively, and EPUB only “through conversion”,
meaning Send to Kindle. Copy an .epub across and it simply won’t appear.
So convert it first, on your own machine:
- Open the EPUB in Calibre and convert it to AZW3.
- Plug the Kindle into your computer. It mounts as a drive. (On a Mac, the 2024 Kindles and the Scribe need Amazon’s Send to Kindle for Mac app for this.)
- Copy the AZW3 into the
documentsfolder. - Eject the drive and unplug.
No account involved, and it works with no internet at all. The catch: books sideloaded this way live on that device and nowhere else. No syncing, no reading position carried to your phone, and nothing comes back after a factory reset.
Which to choose
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| One-off, at a computer | The web uploader |
| From a phone, or regularly | |
| You don’t want Amazon to have a copy | Calibre to AZW3, then USB |
| You want it synced across devices | Web or email — not USB |
If the book arrives looking wrong
Amazon converts your EPUB when it arrives, so a book that turns up with broken chapters or paragraphs running together almost certainly had those problems already. That’s a conversion issue, not a transfer one.
Getting a better conversion covers what to do about it.