I’ve never purchased a Kindle. I’ve had Nooks, iPads, and two generations of Kobos, but a Kindle? Never! This is mostly because these machines won’t accept EPUB files, which are books written in that other format. That pretty much knocks it out of the running for a great portion of the world’s free books, like the ones on Project Gutenburg. (BTW, my Kobo reads Kindle files and EPUBs. How enlightened is that?) Also, it is very hard to remove the DRM from a Kindle book that you purchase on Amazon, even if you manage to detach it from Amazon’s cloud storage system and save it locally.
Happily there is a solution. Kindle Converter pretty much converts any Kindle file you throw at it, from the old MOBI format files to the newer AZW files that end up in your My Kindle Content subdirectory–if you’ve figured out how to download your Kindle files to your PC (or Mac). Now that’s a procedure you have to hunt for! (Does Amazon prefer you don’t save books locally?) You can convert that Kindle book to an EPUB file and remove the DRM at the same time.
It’s clean & easy and hasn’t hiccuped on me even once. I can now read converted Kindle files on my Kobo. Go to the site and try it out. You get ten free tries. By then you should be convinced.
