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Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

That's kinda throwing the baby out with the bathwater. My kindle never has wifi turned on so never talks to Amazon. All books are loaded via Calibre.

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Then why use a kindle at all ? There a better and or freer brands if you don't use amazon ecosystem.

Define better. Eink, lightweight, and perfectly sized for books. What is missing?

Nicer screens/features and hackability mostly. The Kindles so far are midrange hardware at best (and their pricing reflects that). Only the Kindle Oasis 3 approaches a resolution on which you can open a comic/manga/pdf full page and read smaller fonts. Entirely missing from the Amazon lineup (and where we're entering the $400-$1000 range) are ebook tablets.

Having gone through a dozen different reading devices, I can say that I prefer Kobo devices. They admittedly have a special place in my heart for being fixable after I soft bricked one by messing around with the OS via ssh - their "internal" storage is an actual physical micro sd card sitting on the board that you can pop out after opening the device. A kind stranger on a forum sent me a good firmware and a 'dd' later I had a working device again.

Kobo and PocketBook readers have all those features and can be fed with every format you wish just by plugging them to any computer without conversion or by sending them anything by email, or Dropbox.

And you can turn pages by pressing a good old button standing right under your finger.

I never understood the no-epub stance of Amazon. Some carefully edited epubs gets botched when transformed by Calibre.

That said, at hardware level the Kindle is hard to beat.

Dialing in the precise transformations needed for every copy got so annoying I eventually accepted the botching.

Not having to fight the device to stop it from phoning home might also be a feature that's missing from Kindle devices.

The essential page-turn keys.

I pcik up refurb Kindles for 30-50 EUR. Plus Calibre makes for a fine and hassle free experience.

My paperwhite 3 was the best choice at the time for a pocket-sized waterproof reader.

I have two ancient Kindles too as offline versions. Converting and transferring via Calibre.

I like to read on these so the UX outside the reading mode is minimal and perfectly justifiable. Nothing fancy but it gets the job done.

How do you know the WiFi is never turned on?

I have to trust the closed source software does that it purports to do. This is something we all have to do when we use computers. I certainly don't know that Amazon doesn't program the wifi to turn on, find open networks, and phone home while it pretends to be in airplane mode. It does seem rather unlikely given the risks/rewards that Amazon would face in implementing such a system.

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