Quote:
Originally Posted by hermes
Does this mean I have to buy prepaid gift cards?
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Honestly, given your privacy concerns, I'd think you'd
want to use the prepaid gift cards anyway. Provided you live in or regularly visit an enabling country, you can buy them for cash over-the-counter without having to leave any address info.
Certainly you can do it for the Chapters Indigo (a bookstore chain in Canada) gift cards which you can use to pay for your purchases in the Kobo e-bookstore (owned by same said bookstore chain in Canada). They're available over-the-counter with no address info required, and you can go back to "refill" them with another cash payment and thus not dump another credit-card-sized piece of anonymous plastic into the landfill.
And the Kobo bookstore no longer requires you to have a valid credit card on file for purchases as long as you cover the payment via other methods (store credit, gift card) and you can make up anything you like for the billing address provided the postal code is an existing one (and not some random alphanumerical jumble) as long as the country IP matches.
I believe you can do much the same sort of thing with electronic gift certificates/Amazon purchases (you will have to have a Kindle app registered, not necessarily your actual Kindle) and you'd need to break and strip the DRM on the books as they came in (of varying legality in varying locales) unless you lucked out and bought the rare DRM-free books, which are usually available openly via other outlets anyway.
Anyway, as for Sony, you don't have to buy your books through their store if you have concerns about their security. Their e-readers support any standard ADE-DRM store (such as the Kobo store) and of course you can load up DRM-free books from any source.
The Sony readers mostly have no wireless access, so fewer concerns about "phoning home", and you can always use the Kobos without using the wireless (sync or sideload via desktop app alone), and there are many other readers which are similar in this respect.
Amazon does require you to turn on the wireless to register the Kindle and make use of the more useful features, such as collections management. Which can be a problem when people live in areas without reception, but there's an entire thread devoted to workarounds in the Kindle subforum.
Hope this helps, and welcome to MobileRead!