> We collect Personal Information when you use or otherwise interact with the Kobo Services. For example, we collect information about how you use the Kobo Services, such as pages you view, the rate at which you consume e-content (how often and for how long), genres, authors or subject matter you prefer and searches you make or share, the ebooks or audiobooks you have liked, comments you have left and also websites you have viewed through links in the comments. [1]
It's depressing that the market will not stomach the true cost of "dumb" hardware anymore, so it's becoming harder and harder to find. Everything that can be subsidised with hoovering up data, or pushing content, is. If this is the thin end of the wedge, I dread to think where we're heading.
I have an 2010 Kindle Keyboard and naively thought that we wouldn't end up here. The closer we got the less likely I am to "upgrade".
While MOBI began as one's company's proprietary solution, the format is well over a decade old now and quite well understood by the Free Software community. Calibre can convert EPUB (or anything else, really) to MOBI, so you can buy or pirate your ebooks from anywhere and easily put them on a Kindle.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications...
Psst, "Designing Data Intensive Applications" was very good read. Do you know similar books that focus on distributed systems?
In principle, you're absolutely right. In practice, .mobi is easy to generate, modify, fold, spindle, and mutilate with free/Free software.
Even Amazon's .azw is just mobi with * replacing $.