It’s a shame that Kindle doesn’t support all ebook formats, especially the epub format which is widely used elsewhere. Google Play, for instance, uses epub ( instead of AZW or mobi format that Kindle supports) as the ebook file format. So if you want to read the books you purchase from Google Play, you should be first convert the epub file to mobi by using Calibre, an ebook management tool.
There is a catch however: the books you purchased from Google Play mostly comes with DRM, that prohibits you from simply converting the epub file to mobi. You will first have to strip the DRM off the epub before you can ever do the conversion. Here we would like to introduce you a tool that does just that: epubor. After stripping the DRM, you can easily convert the epub file to mobi format using calibre.
epubor has a guide on how to use the tool to strip the DRM off epub, go check it out!
What do we think of this tool?
- Price: First of all, the epubor free edition is just for you to checkout the quality of the conversion; it only converts 20% of the ebook. So if you want to get the whole book, you have to buy the epubor Ultimate edition that costs USD 24.99.
- License Instance: You are allowed to activate up to 3 times on 3 different machines. This is totally understandable as epubor needs to control the license usage too.
- PDF Conversion Functionality: We have been using this tool to strip the DRM off a epub book we bought from Google Play, and we find that it is really working. The converted PDF file is readable on kindle. That’s all that matters to us. The slight drawback is that the generated PDF pages weigh at 66MB at some 200 pages. We have no idea why it needs so much space for so little number of pages. Maybe epubor developer can look into this and enhance it?
- Epub Conversion Functionality: We don’t get to test this functionality, but we believe that it should be working, as the PDF conversion is working.
So our conclusion is that if you have a lot of Google Play books to convert, buying this tool is a good idea. Otherwise it’s still cheaper to first locate the books from Amazon first before looking into Google Play store.
Disclaimer:
Although it is not wrong to tell people how to remove the DRM ( ie: this post is not wrong), we are not condoning piracy: we do not recommend you strip off the DRM and share/sell the books in violation of copyrights laws. Use epubor only when you are certain that you have the rights to read the books anywhere and in however formats that you want.
