Sending ePubs to Kindles

Followed this quick guide: Send to Kindle for Email But encountered some gotchas along the way. So, here goes.

Go to ☰ All:

Then in the menu that pops up, browse to Digital Content & Devices / Kindle E-readers & Books → Apps & Resources / Manage Your Content and Devices, which will bring you to your Digital Content:

From here, Preferences → Personal Document Settings and you’ll find a list of your devices (Kindles, Fire tablets, other devices with the Kindle app installed):

For each device there will be a unique email address where you can send ePub (and other file types), to have them automatically sync to that device.

Scroll down a bit on the same screen and make sure whatever email address you’re going to be sending the files from is listed:

So once all that was setup and configured, I sent myself an ePub file I created:

But, even though my email address was on the approved list, I got an email from Amazon asking me to “Verify your Send to Kindle document request,” so be on the lookout for that I guess. Once I’d verified the transmission, I got another email from Amazon, which included a link back to the Digital Content interface:

The new document should show up within a couple of minutes, which will appear under Digital Content as Docs:

(The Deliver to Device button allows you to quickly send the file to one or more additional devices.)

On my iPhone, when I sent them to that device, they appeared under From Your Library in the Kindle app:

However, on a cheap Amazon Fire 8 HD 7th gen floating around my office, I was looking for the files to appear under Books, but they never did. But then I realized they were categorized as Documents in the Amazon Digital Content interface:

Amazon website showing the 3 new files as Docs

... And that the app on the Fire HD 8 (Android) tablet was named simply “Books” ...

Books app icon

I searched for “Docs” and lo and behold, there’s an app for that:

Docs app icon

Opened that up and sure enough, there were the ePub files I’d sent myself, listed under Send-to-Kindle:

(And I just noticed I have a typo in the author field. 🤦🏻)