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I do not have an Amazon account and don't know much about how it works, but I really need to download the Kindle app on my PC. Is it possible?

I love reading but I don't have much knowledge about how an Amazon account is used for buying, downloading and managing ebooks. So I was wondering if we can use the Kindle app without having to register an Amazon account.

Is that possible?

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    I took the liberty to rephrase your question to make it more readable; hope you don't mind. About your concern, bear in mind that in order to read ebooks, you need an ereader app, but your options are not limited to Kindle. You can check this question too: ebooks.stackexchange.com/q/3622/136
    – Sekhemty
    Commented Feb 10, 2017 at 20:35

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You can certainly download the app onto your device without actually using it. But I assume you really want to know if you can open .mobi files in the Kindle app without an Amazon account. And I'm afraid the answer to that is no.

The good news is that you can use other apps to read .mobi files. FBREADER is one such reader which works on both ios and android; you can find other android apps here http://www.androidauthority.com/best-ebook-ereader-apps-for-android-170696/ . They just can't read the .mobi digital rights management locked files.

Also, remember that .mobi is in many ways an inferior ebook format to .epub . If at all possible, I always prefer the .epub file to the .mobi file (and open them in Google Play Books, iBooks, Adobe Digital Editions, whatever). If you don't have access to the Kindle store, then you can probably find the file as an ebook in another store.

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    Good answer; it should be noted that .mobi is a bit outdated and is superceded by the .azw format; anyway, like you said, if one has no desire to be tied to the amazon ecosystem, choosing the ePub format is the best choice (basically amazon = azw, the rest of the world = epub).
    – Sekhemty
    Commented Feb 10, 2017 at 19:29
  • I would also add that if you have a book in .mobi or .azw format without copy protection (and if you don't have an account on Amazon such files are necessarily so) you may use programs like Calibre to convert them in .epub format and then use another application to read them.
    – mau ♦
    Commented Feb 16, 2017 at 17:44

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