I wanna buy an ebook reader but i don’t want any amazon or other companies shit in there, just something i can connect to my pc, pass ebooks in different formats into it and read.
I’ve looked into this in the past and settled on Kobo. You can disable the telemetry and never use the the Rakuten account part and have a very good ereader… And you can install the open source KOReader software.
https://github.com/koreader/koreader
MobileRead forums and wiki are a good resource for ebook stuff.
For example, a breakdown of the hidden configs on Kobo devices https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_Configuration_Options
+1 on this. Kobos actually use Linux under the hood. And although the default UI is proprietary, it’s super easy to install KOReader.
You don’t even need to hack into it some custom firmware, just a sideloader, which normally doesn’t break even if you actually updated the base firmware.
Here the official tutorial on how to do it: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices
AFAIK every single ebook reader on the market actually runs Linux under the hood!
My kobo is great. You never have to connect it to the internet if you don’t want to. I transfer epub files to it via USB.
Same here. I only buy drm-free from ebooksdotcom, and transfer them with caliber calibre. My kobo wifi isn’t even configured.
*Calibre. (link for those that don’t know it: https://calibre-ebook.com/)
and (for anyone reading this later) if you are all about keeping things up to date, you can sideload firmware
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_Firmware_Releases#Firmware_Download_Link
(at your own risk)
Kobo readers are really neat, I’ve been using them for over a decade and I don’t remember ever using a Rakuten account or even going online with them for anything but software updates or connecting to my local library system (which Kindle can’t do). I use Calibre on the desktop to manage, convert and load my reader and that’s it.
Your best bet for a no BS ebook reader might be this (if it where in stock): https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/
The PineNote won’t be in stock until the community of developers figure out a proper Linux based OS for it. I dig through the forums occasionally and they are making progress, but it won’t be soon.
Yeah, the development for the Pine products take their time, but I wouldn’t want to trade my PineTime for something else. Great gadget for an incredibly low price!
Dude for real!! 30 bucks and does everything I really want a smartwatch to do, without all the telemetry siphoning! Plus that “Terminal” watch face is chef’s kiss. (https://zephyrlabs.github.io/Watchfaces/Terminal/)
i can connect to my pc, pass ebooks in different formats into it and read.
Sounds like you don’t need internet usage. In that case, you can use most ebook readers, including stuff with companies shit on it, and just never connect to the internet. If privacy is the concern, they can’t track you if you never connect to the Internet. You just need to make sure that it has a way to transfer files through usb and can handle epubs.
I love my Remarkable 2. The company has a freemium model for its online services, but the device is lovely on its own and it’s Linux under the hood, with an active modding community delivering cool tweaks.
Here are a few! There was also a whole wiki, RemarkableWiki.com, for a while where users shared technical tips and tricks. It’s not up at the moment and I’m not sure if it’s down permanently or only temporarily. My experience has been similar to @blusterydayve26@midwest.social — I bought the device because I liked how user-modifiable the software was, but once I had it in hand I found that official development was moving briskly enough with new features and UI improvements that I’ve never really had a reason to mod it. I have SSH’d into the device to set it up with a few of the trickier WiFi networks in my life, though, and can confirm that it’s a breeze.
Second the remarkable. It works well enough that I haven’t even bothered to install any of the community extensions, though that would be easy since it’s just Linux and I can SSH into it to install packages.
My experience has been very similar. As I say below, “I bought the device because I liked how user-modifiable the software was, but once I had it in hand I found that official development was moving briskly enough with new features and UI improvements that I’ve never really had a reason to mod it.”
It looks awesome, but doesn’t seem to be that great as an ereader, though.
It really awesome when it comes to reading and annotating PDFs. That’s the main reason I got it — so many e-readers I’ve tried over the years have been horrible for PDF documents and as a professor that’s like 80% of my day. For ePub documents, it’s very capable now — even if that wasn’t the case a few software versions ago. That said, the experience is a bit idiosyncratic among e-reader devices. The Remarkable basically converts the ePub to a static document so that the UI can more or less treat it as a PDF, which is a different user experience than some other e-readers. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s different.
I’ve had a good experience with an old Kindle 3G and the Calibre program. You can get the old Kindles pretty cheap and they don’t have the built-in ads and some of the slightly useless features of the new ones.
That, or like the16bitgamer mentioned, an iPad has good options for free ebook apps without ads or tracking. I found this one called eBoox that has great usability and no ads. It’s weirdly marketed as a “cute” ebooks app, but it’s honestly better than the stock one and doesn’t actually have cats or those pictures that are in the description in the actual app.
