Will I be Penalized for Having Pirated Books on a Kindle?

Will I be penalized for having pirated books on a Kindle paperwhite? Let’s get one things straight: You are are a thief! That’s what you are! Kindle Books are affordable. That’s particularly the case when it comes to novels. There are so many self publishing authors out there that the competition in terms of pricing tends to be rather fierce. I know, the whole thing is probably not the best of scenarios from the point of view of writers, but the fact remains that you can find novels in any genre for as little as 99 cents on Amazon.

Not only that, but, if you know where to look, you are likely to find books on the platform that you can read absolutely free of charge. In spite of this, you will still find people looking for pirate books. But I am not here to judge you. A question that I get a lot from people regards whether or not Amazon will penalize them for having non-Kindle books on their machines. If you download a pirated book onto your Kindle, are you in danger of having your Kindle bricked?

Is it possible to have non Kindle Books on a Kindle?

This is a subject that I tackle in another post. The only thing that I can say here is that, yes, it’s quite possible to read non Kindle books on a Kindle. Your books only need to be in the acceptable formats. These are mainly the MOBI and PDF formats.

Kindles do not take EPUB files. The good news is that there are hundreds of platforms on the web that you can use to convert books from one format to the other. So, if you have EPUB books; or books in any other format; you can easily convert them to the MOBI format using one of these tools. And the conversion usually takes only a few seconds.

Will Amazon Penalize me for putting non-Kindle books on a Kindle?

So, will you be penalized for putting pirated books onto your Kindle? Will Amazon brick your Kindle as punishment? The answer in NO! It’s true, Amazon probably can tell if you have non-Kindle books on your Kindle. However, there is no way for Amazon to know whether or not the books were purchased from some other genuine, non-Kindle source. Perhaps you got your books from Kobo or from Nook. I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to know. What it means is that you can safely have pirated books on your Kindle.

Should you read pirated books?

Now we have answered the question, “Will I be penalized for having pirated books on a Kindle Paperwhite?” As an author, the prospect of having my books pirated is one that scares me. It takes so much effort and time to come up with something that is readable that it doesn’t seem fair that there are some people out there who simply download books from the internet without paying for them. If an author is offering a book free of charge, that is well and good.

But for anyone to pirate books is inherently unfair. It’s the same issue that happens with music. And there, we have had instances where hefty fines were slapped on offenders. So, no, I don’t think anybody should stoop to the level of pirating books. As mentioned at the start, books are cheap enough. There is really no need for anyone to pirate them.