Indeed a valid question, asked by Mathew Ingram of Globe and Mail and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Their argument goes like this: The Amazon Kindle does not only support the proprietary Mobipocket e-book format, but also other popular formats such as text or Word. Pirated e-books found on Torrent sites (and elsewhere) could easily be converted into one of the supported formats. In a next step, the filthy pirate could use Amazon's Whispernet or USB connectivity to move these e-books onto his device.
Heck, who knows, maybe Whispernet could even turn into some kind of Darknet where people start swapping pirated e-books like mad. But somehow I doubt this. Have you ever heard of a pirate who is willing to pay $0.10 for every swapped file?
So what do you think? Could the Kindle spark book piracy in near future?
Globe and Mail:
Could the Kindle spark book piracy?
TechCrunch:
Stealing Books For The Kindle Is Trivially Easy