Well, regarding tablets: the whole point is that I hate the quantity of time staring at the LCD screen on my laptop.
Regarding hacking/jailbreaking: it amounts to deep distrust of companies like Google and Amazon. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and a *bunch* of other plugins so that I reduce the amount of tracking and bullshit. I *hate* advertising.
I *do* use Amazon for some purchases, I haven't fully escaped Google. I'm not 100% all the way or dogmatic.
I have a Google Pixel that I installed LineageOS on with *not* Google Apps.
I just would like to have a reasonably convenient, functional device and have something like the Privacy Guard in LineageOS and the fact that it uses mostly only free/libre/open apps. I want to just use my device and not have Amazon track what I'm reading. I don't care that much if they know I have a device though. I don't want to get book recommendations based on what blogs or news articles I happen to read.
So, I'd love the ereader equivalent of being able to use wifi but *not* let the wifi connect to Kobo or Amazon or BN, just let it load web articles *and* only with an adblocker… maybe that's not really an option.
Re: transferring articles to epub etc. what about these:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epub/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...e-web-offline/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...n/saveasebook/
Any of those seem like they'd work. Any article that works well in Firefox reader…