Daily Authority: 📚 Kindles and EPUBs

🚀 Good morning — check out the Rocket Labs rocket booster being caught by a helicopter, it’s really something.

Kindle ebooks get easier

Finally, finally, Amazon is going to make it easier to load your own books onto your Kindle.

In short:

• Amazon will start accepting EPUB files onto Kindles by “late 2022”.
• It’s held out since 2007, as it tried to ensure the easiest way to read an e-book was just buying one through its own Kindle e-books store.

The details:

• Owning a Kindle has been the default choice for millions: well-priced, capable, simple, and the standard for reading the latest thrillers to re-reading Lord Of The Rings or Twilight.
• That said, as an e-reader, it was a bit of a walled garden: Amazon would happily let you upload files to a Kindle, but only if they were PDFs, or Word docs, or the old MOBI file type, which it has supported as a bit of relic since it bought Mobipocket in 2005.
• Those restrictions meant if you wanted to buy some fun new or old sci-fi from some more ethical online store, you couldn’t use, quote “basically what everyone else in the world uses,” which is EPUB.
• Amazon has been using a proprietary AZW3 file type (sometimes known as KF8) as its standard, but is now opening up to EPUB, a rare pro-consumer move.
• Or is it just anti-antitrust? At best, it seems like more of a begrudging move that Amazon doesn’t really want to talk about. There’s no announcement or blog post. Instead, TechCrunch notes an update to a support page, here, Amazon’s Help & Customer Service page.
• With this, we can all just email ourselves EPUB files, and Amazon will do the rest.
• It’s not quite Apple allowing Android phones onto iMessage, but it is a big wall falling in the world of protected ecosystems.

How-to email yourself:

• As an aside, for Kindle owners out there, you know you have a Kindle email address, right? And you can send stuff to it?
• Here’s Amazon’s support page for all the details, but essentially, you can just send an email with an attachment and after a few confirmations, it’ll load up on the Kindle.
• It works well! And it’ll work much more quickly and easily when it comes to support for EPUB.
• More Kindle tips and tricks here.

Roundup

📸 “Should I buy the Google Pixel 6 or wait for the Pixel 7?” (Android Authority).

⌚ Lawsuit alleges all Fitbit devices are prone to burning users (Android Authority).

🤝 Latest Google Play system update makes file sharing easier between your devices (Android Authority).

👉 OnePlus Nord 3 appears on company website. Launch imminent? (Android Authority).

🔌 The first 240W USB-C cables just broke cover: No gadget supports 240W USB-C, yet, but the egg has come first. Or the chicken (The Verge).

🏍 Harley-Davidson’s LiveWire teases electric motorcycle launch for next week (The Verge).

💳 Apple slammed by EU for denying Apple Pay rivals access to iPhone’s NFC tech, but not much will change for the time being. Apparently, PayPal led the complaint (Ars Technica).

🍎 Apple sues RISC-V chip startup: Apple alleges theft of trade secrets related to the “hiring of more than 40 Apple staff”. Among other elements of the suit, Apple wants royalties (MacRumors).

🏨 Google adds some useful features for finding flights and hotels: track flight prices between two cities, new overlays on neighborhoods, and such (blog.google).

😬 Mozilla has a bunch of alarming details on mental health apps like Better Help and Headspace, along with prayer apps. This is part of its “Privacy Not Included” efforts we’ve previously covered before on IoT devices. I’ve asked Mozilla directly for more details on the differences between iOS and Android apps but they said that may take a few weeks (Mozilla).

⚡ VW and BP will install thousands of fast EV chargers at gas stations starting in the UK (Engadget).

🔋 This Chinese EV sells for about $5,000, so this team tried it out: “It costs less than adding CarPlay to a Ferrari … and astonishingly, the company is reportedly making less than $14 profit on each car.” (Wired).

🚀 Rocket Lab sent 34 satellites into space and tried to use a helicopter to catch the rocket booster to attempt to reuse it: The helicopter grab worked, but the pilot chose to drop the booster into the ocean, where it was then recovered. Here’s a CNBC report, and brief footage from the helicopter.

📽 The first Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness reactions are here (it opens May 6), and it sounds like a wild ride (Gizmodo).

📏 “When I look in a mirror that’s 3 feet away from me, am I seeing myself like I’m standing 3ft away or 6ft away?” (The answer is 6ft — but the link is if you want to read people’s minds being blown.) (r/askreddit)

Chart Tuesday

Here’s the state of Netflix mooching according to a survey of 2,209 US adults run by a firm called Morning Consult and turned into a chart by Statista:

• In short, there’s a pretty healthy cohort who share passwords and/or use someone’s password.
• As for 31% of people who don’t use Netflix, that base seems pretty rigid.
• Hence, Netflix seems to eventually be targeting those who do use but without paying directly.
• Some good news for Netflix not in this chart: Around one in three streaming subscribers would pay extra to legally share their password.
• 10% of people in the survey said “Yes, definitely,” and 20% said “Yes, probably,” to paying more.

Warmly,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.