I'm seriously considering a kindle but for my needs they are useless unless you're OK with being a mobile data satellite for bezos. They lock you out of core functionality if you don't register the device, including but not limited to:
- dictionary downloads
- sorting your book into collections
- vocabulary builder
and potentially more. For a device that costs hundreds of dollars I find that utterly unacceptable. There may be a way to circumvent it but I'm unsure if that is relevant for the current firmware versions. Also its been suggested that the device phones home even if unregistered, however I'm yet to fully confirm that claim.
So if you value your privacy and don't want to sell your soul to amazon in exchange for the 'privilege' of reading on 'your' device that you paid hundreds of dollars for, I'd probably steer clear of kindle or be prepared to jump through serious hoops in order to bypass all the nonsense.
Kobo probably isn't much better in that regard but you can bypass the registration and sideload everything without ever having to connect it to the internet or compromise functionality so in my mind that's a serious win
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