Sapiens

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Your PDFs on your Kindle, as books rather than photographs of pages

Upload a PDF and get an EPUB with reflowable text and real chapters, so the type resizes and the page turns. Download it, or send it straight to your Kindle.

Choose your PDF:

Download the EPUB

For USB transfer, Calibre, or Amazon's «Send to Kindle» app.

Your @kindle.com address (step 2 in the guide below). First time round, approve our sender at Amazon first (step 1) — without it, Amazon discards the email without warning.

The PDF is read in your browser: it never touches our server unless you choose to email the finished book.

How it reaches your Kindle

  1. Approve our sender at Amazon (first time only)

    Amazon only delivers documents from senders you have approved, and it discards everything else without telling you — no bounce, no error message. Add this address to your approved list:

    send@books.getsapiens.com

    Open your Amazon document settings Once there: Preferences → Personal Document Settings → Approved Personal Document E-mail List → Add a new approved e-mail address.

    Buy from a different Amazon store? Open the same page on yours — amazon.co.uk, amazon.es, amazon.com.mx and the rest all have it.

  2. Copy your own @kindle.com address

    It's on that same Amazon screen, under «Send-to-Kindle E-Mail Settings». Each device has its own, shaped like name_123@kindle.com. This is your Kindle's address, not the email you sign in to Amazon with.

  3. Paste, send, sync

    Paste your text above, enter your @kindle.com address and hit send. With your Kindle on wifi, the book lands in your library within a couple of minutes.

Why a PDF on a Kindle is unreadable, and what this does about it

Amazon will happily deliver a PDF to your Kindle, and then show you a fixed A4 page on a six-inch screen: type too small to read, no reflow, no resizing, pinch-and-pan instead of page turns. The «convert» trick in the subject line does better but throws the structure away. This page takes the other route — it reads the PDF's text layer in your browser, works out from the layout what was a heading and what was a paragraph, and rebuilds it as a proper EPUB. Reflowable text, chapters in the table of contents, your own font size, highlights that land in your clippings file.

  • Reflowable text, so the Kindle sets the type at your size instead of shrinking a page to fit.
  • Headings become chapters — inferred from font sizes, not guessed from filenames — so the table of contents and the progress bar work.
  • Reads two-column layouts down one column and then the other, instead of straight across the gutter.
  • Rejoins lines the PDF broke and heals words split by a hyphen at the line end. Numbered lists stay lists; bulleted ones do too where the PDF records its bullets as text, which most — but not all — producers do.
  • Drops the furniture: running heads, footers and page numbers repeated on every page.
  • Tables and images do not come through, and a scanned PDF is refused with an explanation rather than a book of blank chapters.

PDF to Kindle: what works and what doesn't

Why not just email the PDF to my Kindle?

You can, and for a PDF whose layout matters — sheet music, a scanned map, a design portfolio — you should. But a text PDF sent that way stays a fixed page: on a six-inch screen the type is unreadable and cannot be resized. Converting to EPUB is what makes it behave like a book.

My PDF is a scan. Will it work?

No, and the page will tell you so rather than produce an empty book. A scan is a picture of text with no text layer to read, so it needs OCR first — Acrobat, macOS Preview's text recognition, or any OCR tool — and then it will come through here fine.

What happens to tables, figures and images?

They are left out; this rebuilds prose. A report whose argument lives in its tables will arrive thin, so look at the chapter count and the result before you send it. Where the figures are the point, email the original PDF to your Kindle as well and keep both.

How does it know where the chapters are?

From the type. The size carrying most of the text is the body, anything meaningfully larger is a heading, and the shallowest heading level used more than once becomes the chapter break. It is inference, so it can be wrong — but on a report or a book with real headings it lands where you would.

Does it work with academic papers in two columns?

Yes. A gutter no line of text crosses is detected per page, and each column is read to its foot before the next one starts. Papers are also where dropped tables and figures hurt most, so treat the EPUB as the reading copy and keep the PDF for the exhibits.

Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?

No. The PDF engine runs inside your browser tab and the file is opened on your own machine — nothing is sent, and there is nothing for us to store. Only if you choose «send to my Kindle» does the finished EPUB pass through our server once, to be emailed.

Is there a size or page limit?

Six hundred pages, which is a limit on how long your tab is willing to work rather than a paywall. Emailed books are capped at 15 MB, and text-only EPUBs are far smaller than that.

Can I fix the title before sending?

Yes. The title comes from the PDF's own metadata, or the largest text on the first page when the metadata is a junk default like «Microsoft Word - draft». Both are often wrong, so the title and author fields above are editable and are what your Kindle library will show.

Like the tools? Wait until it writes you a course.

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