E-books are becoming tools of corporate surveillance

If you understand that and take proper precautions, I would imagine that any ereader that doesn't require registration would be fine. If you never put it online, it cannot accidentally go online. Plus it isn't tied to your name. Personally, I use Kobo. You have to jump through a hoop to bypass registration by modifying an SQLite database. Other than that there are no protections, so you aren't using sketchy software to realize that degree of privacy.

You can download your books as you want and copy them to the device in many ways, including connecting the thing via USB to your pc and using it as an external storage unit. Sounds trivial but try to do that with a smartphone.

You can buy books from their shop if you make an account, but it is completely optional.

Curious about this one. The price is set by the publisher, so it's not like you can just opt to pay for a DRM or a DRM-free copy of the book at checkout.

I assume you mean that the publishers who offer DRM-free books tend to be more expensive? That might track if they're indie publishers, since they can't afford to be loss-leaders on a product.

But FWIW, Tor Books offers all of their stuff DRM free across the major platforms (Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, B&N, Apple Books, etc.) and they go on sale just as often as the major publishers, in my experience.

https://jacobalbano.com/2021/06/24/setting-up-a-kobo-without...

After some googling I found you can start it in "sideloader" mode. To do that I plugged it in as USB device and updated a config file by adding "sideloaderMode=true". After restart it skipped account creation and allowed me to start reading the books.

I use Calibri to manage my books and collections. Haven't found how to add dictionaries as of yet but I think it can be done too.

I think this is bordering on the unreasonable to be honest. There is no reason to assume it's doing this, and it would be wildly illegal (in EU at least).

For this to be true they'd either need their own trackers on every single website online (or be ingesting from those that do but at which point it's not Elsevier's tracking) or be have software/browser addon installed on the clients' system.

Only a small handful of companies have approached the near-ubiquity of webpage presence of the former that made cross-internet tracking a realistic scenario (see eg. past critique of Google/Facebook embeds) but afaict the only thing being interpreted here is a line in a privacy policy that is very likely being misinterpreted.

Certainly the report doesn't make any claim about ubiquitous internet tracking in its key findings summaries. Contrast that to how Fight for the Future has run with it:

> Elsevier tracks more than what books someone reads—it surveils readers’ search and browsing history across the whole web, collects their locations, and builds profiles based on inferences from this data.

Google makes a similar argument, but I am not convinced. They still give information to abusive governments, and their in-house infrastructure for monetizing your data is state of the art.

Plus, data breaches are basically inevitable. Even if they weren’t, some percentage of FAANG will eventually have a few down quarters in a row and sell access to the data to the highest bidder, or be acquired by an oligarch.

It has to be, otherwise the author would need to address the issue that they are writing an article about surveillance, for a site that attempts to load almost 40 different trackers when you read the article.