Amazon is finally ready to add support for the popular ePub file format to its Kindle lineup.

In an easy-to-miss article on its Kindle Content Help page, Amazon revealed that ePub support will arrive in late 2022.

However, you will not be able to open these ePub files directly on your Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition. Instead, the Send to Kindle feature will convert these files to a format the Amazon eReader can use.

It provides a partial solution to a long-standing and particularly strange problem. Namely, that the world’s most popular e-reader is incompatible with the world’s most popular e-book format.

In a sense, then, Amazon is finally catching up with the eReaders provided by all its rivals, such as Kobo and Barnes & Noble, some 15 years after the rollout of the ePub format.

It’s not the full alloy-free support that users of these rivals can enjoy, but at least it will prevent Kindle users from having to manually convert ePub files, or fiddle with third-party apps that do the work for you.

In other news, the aforementioned post revealed that Amazon will be dropping support for .MOBI and .AZW file formats in late 2022. According to Amazon, “MOBI is an older file format and does not support latest Kindle features for documents. ”

You will still be able to open existing files in these formats on your Kindle, but Amazon will no longer allow you to send new files to your Kindle through the Send to Kindle messaging system.