Are the new Kindles capable of reading ePub (or HTML?) files directly?
Well, all of the Kindles have been capable of reading HTML files from day one -- if one accesses that HTML file via the included "experimental" HTML browser. Now the early Kindle HTML browsers really stank, the more recent HTML browsers seem to do what they need to do "pretty well." For example they have an "article reading mode" where you can go to a newspaper web site, find an article you want to read, switch to "article reading mode" and the article more-or-less shows up as-if one were reading natively from a mobi file. What you cannot do is say side-load an HTML file onto a Kindle using USB and expect a Kindle to read it as-if a supported "native" file format. One would need to use Kindlegen, for example, to convert that HTML (or unencrypted ePub) file to .mobi format before side-loading it onto a Kindle. Kindle "native" doc file support is only for: AZW, TXT, PDF, and unencrypted MOBI (aka PRC) They also claim support for a bunch of MSFT file formats, but that is really only via "on the fly" file format conversion using MSFT Office file format conversion tools (assuming you have MSFT Office)