But it is a pretty clever hack to get a hostile machine to not connect to the internet as airplane mode is (I assume) regulated behavior.
Yup, this was once a thing - you didn't need wifi for sync or downloading books at all.
eta: My point being: Now you're in a twisty little maze full of corner cases, all different. Not the sort of thing much loved by Amazon (or any of the GRAFT).
> if the developers take the egregious step of nerfing airplane mode,
and I was responding that IF the developers decide to nerf the airplane mode it's very possible they will start using any open AP; some TV's are reportedly doing this already
Literally any device you own with WiFi could be updated tomorrow to connect to any open access point.
It doesn't seem so far-fetched that the Kindle might, too.
Never supply a wifi connection during setup, and instead immediately engage airplane mode. USB transfer is easy with something like Calibre, which also handily converts ePub to Mobi for Kindle use.
It used to be that you could buy Kindle books and download them to your computer for transfer to the Kindle via USB, but they seem to have made that more difficult in the last year or two. Other sources still work fine, though.
That fact that Amazon collects these very detailed metrics has been well known for a long time. You will find old discussions in the MobileRead forum. Here is a thread from 2013 "Block Big Brother":
Same, however I had to connect my Kindle Oasis to the internet 1 time after purchase though, if i remember correct it was to download the dictionaries (for translation) i needed. And i think there was a feature that was missing until i connected it to the internet once (i used a new/temporary account for that) but can't remember what feature that was though.
Any cheap budget tablet can read ebooks and stay off the internet.
[1]: https://hackaday.io/project/168761-the-open-book-feather
E-ink gives you Better screen for text, a lot better battery life, no apps, no notifications, no video ads, o ads in general, nothing flashy.
And kindles are relatively cheap, and available almost everywhere.
Why is it subsidized? Obviously to make it more fun to buy books, but also collecting valuable data on your reading habits. Obviously they know _what_ you're reading but it seems useful to them also to know what you bookmark etc.
They also have all the hardware they need for location history tracking by remembering wifi broadcasts seen. Is it known if that's being uploaded?
The downside is that eInk currently only supports black-and-white and turning pages is roughly only as fast as turning the page of a book.
Also, battery life is counted in days (and sometimes weeks) and not in hours.
E-ink Kaleido with 4096 colors at 100 ppi are available commercially since past few weeks
Plus, for all the people saying basically "it's for your own good", the battery lasts much longer on aeroplane mode. For this device, for me, WiFi is an anti-feature.
It will convert any format of E-Book to a compatible format for the Kindle (usually MOBI) and allows you to upload it directly. I use it often and it's an amazing piece of software!
Edit: Oh no, Amazon removed KindleGen! When did that happen? I still have x86 copies for Linux and windows if anyone wants it. Supposedly "Kindle Previewer" can do the same thing, but a cursory glance looks like it no longer supports Linux...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765...
We know where this is going, don't we? Offering interoperability in the beginning and then gradually taking it away - the old bait and switch trick. We consumers fall for it again and again.
I doubt I have a copy of it somewhere. Does anyone have / know of a copy of kindlegen for Linux anywhere?
Edit: Wayback machine has it, thank god. Had a very real sense of loss there. Unsure why it's a project I've hardly touched for years. https://github.com/wjdp/gotdict for the interested.
Highly recommend.
Edit: I know I could convert between formats, but that process is not always perfect and can lose important formatting.
The pitfall in all this, though, is that there are a lot of commercial books that are only available from publishers that use DRM, and personally I don't consider DRM a sufficient justification for piracy -- so that leaves me stuck with locked books regardless. Lately I've been buying them from Apple rather than Amazon, although if I actually jump through whatever hoops are required to set up DRM stripping with Calibre for Kindle books, assuming that's still possible, I may switch back.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056, see "Significant locations"
Last but not least, Significant Locations data is not just described as "end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read by Apple", it's clearly in the list of items under "By enabling Location Services, location-based system services such as these will also be enabled": e.g., if you're really, really bothered by this, you can turn it off.
Even if you trust that Apple does not use it for anything else, you cannot check this (no source code) and you cannot be sure that they won’t start using it in the future.
Opt-out tracking is not ethical. It should be opt-in.