[sasaki]

Thank you everybody for your answers and sorry about the double post. I thought it didn't work in the first place and can't suppress it now. If a moderator can suppress this one it is welcome.

Can you be more precise what do you mean by doing a Hard Reset? In my mind, you are only rebooting the device, and not restoring factory defaults.

I did a manual factory reset as explained here. I am really surprised it didn't work as expected. It actually generated a new database in which I only changed the UserID and UserKey and ended up with the exact same error. The database may be broken elsewhere.

I would suggest installing the latest firmware release, then you can enable sideload mode. All of this can be done without internet or registering the Kobo. If you really want to bypass registration on the older firmware, I can help with that, but can't think of any benefit to doing so.

Then I will probably choose this solution because the new functionalities will certainly please me. This sideloaded mode in itself is enough to attract me to this solution, especially if I can do that without an internet connection. The benefit to stick to the older firmware would be not taking the risk to brick the device while flashing it. Can you please indicate me how I can flash the firmware from usb ? A quick search on this forum and the web didn't show proper results and I it may be a delicate task.

Note that since only UserID, and UserKey fields acutally require a value, this will work without having to know the exact number of empty columns.

As far as I can remember this didn't work when I unboxed the product and I struggled for hours to be able to bypass registration. This is why I wanted to document my results. Yes @JSWolf, without screwing up everyone's database, which is why I do some efforts to understand my issue well.

I would guess that you have never tried to browse the web on an eInk device? It is not something that I would do if I could avoid it.

I did try and I'm really interested in exploring how to make it as convenient as possible to perform basic tasks online with an eInk display. I think this kind of experiences are a great step towards gaining more freedom about screens addiction. I know I can install linux on my Kobo, this is why I need a working internet connection. I may buy another one and use this one only for reading though, leaving the wifi off and using the latest firmware in sideloaded mode.

The email address I set up for my Kobo registration has only received emails from Kobo so I would agree that they are not selling the information.

Having my data simply collected is enough to bother me. By the more their privacy policy clearly states they do share personal data with third parties for marketing and analysis purposes. I'm still interested about what kobo may offer, but I clearly don't agree with their privacy practices. I'll consider checking their commercial offers later, when I'll have finished a few books.

@JSWolf As it is not really the subject I will just answer once here. I would really be happy to discuss with you about privacy -or my psychological health- in PM or in another topic.

Is the reason you don't want to register is because you plan on reading stolen eBooks and feel that if you do register that Kobo will find out and you may get in trouble?

No I simply want to protect my privacy. This is a conscious ethical posture. If everyone made like me, this numerical world would not be a complete mess. You must already know there are plenty of open-source or public domain books online, and an ereader can be used to read a bunch of other type of content than books.

Yes, this is paranoia otherwise, you'd just do a normal registration that won't cause any problem. What else would you call it?

Paranoia means, to sum up, irrational fears with untrue persecutory beliefs. I would simply call my behavior caution. It is a public information that most companies do things to spy and manipulate people, among other debatable practices. Having personal data about all the books you read, your bookmarks and notes being collected and shared with third parties is not trivial. I don't fear it, because, among other reasons, I'm quite confident it is hard to manipulate me, but I would prefer avoiding it if possible. There are other potential issues than manipulation, but I will stop talking about it here. Please let me know if you are interested in debating on this topic.