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I recently purchased a Kindle Paperwhite. My local library provides books in a variety of formats, ePUB and Kindle being 2 of them. For the Kindle I was able to transfer them without much effort to my Paperwhite.

However for the ePUB formatted books I had to download Adobe Digital Edition to download the books. Once I had the ePUB file on my Mac OSX laptop I could not determine how to transfer this file to my Kindle.

Is this possible?

My research led me to 2 possible methods, one being to strip the DRM from the ePUB and then transfer the DRM free resulting PDF to the Kindle. The others methods were that it wasn't possible.

Is there a better alternative that doesn't require me to strip the DRM from the ePUB file?

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2 Answers 2

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Your Kindle cannot handle .epub files.

You could convert .epub to .mobi e.g. using Calibre, but this is only possible without DRM. There are also plugins to remove DRM, but using them is probably not legal in most jurisdictions.

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The simplest method I found was to install Calibre along with the DeDRM plugin: https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/releases/latest.

I don't like that I have to do this just to gain access to public library books on my Kindle but saw no other way to accomplish this.

General steps to install the DeDRM plugin

  1. Download the latest tools package, and unzip it.
  2. Run calibre. From the Preferences menu select “Change calibre behavior”.
  3. Click on Plugins (under “Advanced”) — it looks like a jigsaw puzzle piece.
  4. Click on the large “Load plugin from file” button
  5. Navigate to the tools folder unzipped
  6. Open the “DeDRM_calibre_plugin” folder
  7. Select the DeDRM_plugin.zip file in that folder
  8. Click on the “Add” (sometimes “Open”) button.
  9. Click on the “Yes” button in the “Are you sure?” warning dialog that appears. A “Success” dialog will appear, saying that the plug-in has been installed. Click on “OK”.

Once installed I simply opened the ePUB files that I checked out & downloaded with Adobe Digital Edition, and then converted them from within Calibre (right click on any book and select "Convert Books -> Convert Individually" and select MOBI as the output format.

Once the book has been converted to MOBI you can use Calibre to transfer the resulting MOBI file to your Kindle via the "Devices" icon.

References

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  • I read that this only works for Adobe Digital Editions versions older than 3.0. Is that true?
    – gerrit
    Mar 12, 2020 at 12:12

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