[frostschutz]

Basically there is no way to disable it. Well you probably could, but then you'll have a brick, because Factory Reset is like the only method these devices use to recover a corrupt filesystem or database.

The edition 2 has an internal sd card I believe? You could take out and create a backup image of it, and clone to a replacement card.

On my H2O, I cut a hole in the back of the reader so this card can be accessed directly without taking the device apart. This hole is then sealed with a bit of duct tape.

I don't know if your mother would be able to turn off the reader, replace a microsd card, and turn it back on again.

Where does she live? If there was someone in her area that could help with the set up, you might be able to avoid the shipping issue.

If it was my uncle, I could probably get him to connect the device to his PC, which I have remote access to. The difficulty lies in making sure whatever you copy onto the device remotely, actually works as intended...

Restoring a full backup copy via PC would restore everything except wifi connectivity as the wifi password isn't stored in the user accessible area. And if you use mods those too of course, they install to the system partition; maybe it would be possible to combine several mods into one KoboRoot.tgz to install them all in one go.