There is not much ebook piracy within Kindle ecosystem similarly as there is not much app piracy within iPhone ecosystem. The piracy exists on both and is triv

There is not much ebook piracy within Kindle ecosystem similarly as there is not much app piracy within iPhone ecosystem. The piracy exists on both and is trivial for most readers of HN to perform, but for casual users of Kindle and iPhone it is a bit of pain. Bezo is giving a particular viewpoint looking at the issue from Amazon Kindle window. That is, if you are a regular user of Amazon Kindle it will be very convenient for you to buy a licence to use e-books within Amazon ecosystem and relatively painful to pirate books. If you are just a tiny bit technical you can easily strip Amazon DRM (used to be a simple Python script) for backup, in case Amazon decides to recall a particular book. You can also pirate books on Kindle, but you will most likely need to convert books to Kindle format .mobi using Calibre unless you like reading misformatted pdfs. Again simple but for someone who is not actively searching and is happy paying Amazon, not something they would do. On the other hand if you are using a competitor's device, it is relatively easy to find books to pirate in .epub format but the market share is much too small to matter. I do not go out looking aggressively for pirate sites, but there are a few Russian based places(hint: library of biblical creation) where you can find pretty much any book released in the past 10 years, most books released in the past 10-20 years and some books released earlier. If you can't find it on that Russian site you can find it in Indian or Chinese forums. I am sure there is American ebook pirate scene too but I did not pursue the matter. So it is a combination of factors: Amazon being the market leader with its closed eco-system and ease of purchasing, the lack of clear poster child for e-book piracy since the demise of library.nu 2 years ago, the fragmentation of ebook pirate market. Disclaimer: I own multiple e-readers including a Amazon Kindle DX demo model that I reflashed into a regular one.