Quote:
Originally Posted by Mummelpuffin
So... yeah. I want an e-reader that doesn't rely on a specific store. I want to be able to have a bunch of books stored on a USB or whetever and transfer them onto it rather than not actually owning the stuff that I buy, or having it exclusively out in "the cloud".
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Looks like the issue is more about where you buy your books from and not so much about the device you use to read them. As long as the place you are buying from provides a download and the download is a decent format (a real file, epub or pdf, and the possible DRM is easily crackable), you can read it anywhere and nobody will track you, provided that you do not use an app that insists on being logged in over an active internet connection. Just keep the internet connection off and everything will be fine.
Kindle makes online-reading really convenient and auto-syncs your Amazon e-library over the cloud in the process (and tracks you at the same time). For offline/sideloaded reading, a major inconvenience on Kindle is that it does not support epub, which is the most common e-book format, so you have to use Calibre on the computer to convert those books.
Most people on this forum consider Calibre a wonderful thing, but I consider it a nuisance, an unnecessary middle-man and a waste of space on the computer. All I want is to download a file in the webbrowser and drag-and-drop it to the e-reader over a cable connection. The e-reader itself never has a compelling reason to connect to the internet, IMHO.
I have never bought an e-book from the Amazon webstore. I hear they use a Kindle-specific format there. The purchase used to be downloadable, maybe it still is, but two important facts make me avoid Amazon - that the download is not an explicit promise up front and the format is something that only works in the Kindle app/device. Luckily Amazon is not ruling the entirety of the e-book world yet.
The overwhelming majority of my reading material has been found free by googling, not by purchasing. Much of it is in pdf format, the rest in epub, djvu, and doc. Therefore I need an ereader that can handle these different formats. Pocketbook and Android e-readers can handle pretty much all the formats out of the box.
It is important to consider the possibility of installing the reading app that you like most. This is very much needed particularly for pdf. Again, Pocketbook and Android e-readers do a decent job displaying pdf out of the box with their default reading apps. Zooming, cropping, arbitrary column-setting, etc. are absolute necessities with pdf.
There is a version of Koreader, a very good free app for e-reading in a bunch of formats, available for Pocketbooks (easiest to install), for Kobo (where installation and patching procedures are more difficult and error-prone), and for jailbroken Kindle. A Kindle is not worth buying, unless it can be jailbroken or unless everything you read comes from Amazon bookstore or unless you passionately love post-processing stuff with Calibre.