A kindle will do the same thing. Everything is privacy-respecting if there's no internet connection.

kindles have cellular modems

Not all of them and they are surprisingly easy to remove. At least the old ones are: https://peekread.info/tech/20210120-removing-3g-modem-from-a...

They've stopped making Kindles with modems. Latest gen ones are WiFi only. Of course, the hardware might still be in there, just not available for book purchasing.

I really enjoy my Kobo Libra H2O with KOReader installed.

My new Kobo refused to start out of the box, without making an account. Very disappointing.

I created an account, but then installed KOreader on my Libra 2 and just read books through that. It's FOSS, more customizable, and supports OPDS feeds which can do pretty neat things like finding articles from HN[0].

[0] https://github.com/BHSPitMonkey/news2reader

I read that KOreader is unstable on the Libra 2[0], so I haven’t installed it yet even though I would like to. What has been your experience running it?

[0] https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues/8414

I had it installed for a while, and there were fairly frequent crashes (i.e. about once every 8 hours of reading) requiring a reboot.

But it was _almost_ worth it. It's a really great reader, especially for reading PDFs.

After some software update about 6 months ago it got halfway uninstalled somehow and I did a factory reset and haven't reinstalled it yet. I recall reading that it's not on KOreader's side, and they can'tfix. :(

It's been perfectly stable for me since I got the device a few months ago, but I also don't read for hours at a time like the other commenter. It's possible that it leaks memory after viewing several hundred pages or something like that.

Can confirm you need to log into your Kobo account to get it going.