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FastCompany: E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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Never considered my library was spying on me. Spent years hyping the library system to save money on ebooks. Does pirating all your ebooks solve the problem or does tracking also take place on the e-reader side too?
I used a Kindle, but get the lion's share of my ebooks from Anna's archive. Books are often delivered to my Kindle through the email to Kindle service.
I have no illusions that every single book I read is fed through Amazon's data machine. The Kindle estimates the time to completion of a book based on your reading speed - everything that it could possibly interpolated from your reading... Will be. And you can bet it will be sold, or at the very least advertised to you on Amazon.
I do the same by feeding my kindle via email. Got my kindle but wonder if there are more privacy friendly readers
I have a Kobo, you can set it to “sideload mode” and you don’t need an account of any kind. It disables the store and all that and I never turn WiFi on so it’s completely offline.
I use Calibre, an amazing FOSS ebook manager, to sync my books to the Kobo.
Pretty much just download whatever from Anna’s Archive, throw it in Calibre and get it to fetch all the artwork and metadata if I want it and sync to the Kobo.
Calibre takes a little getting used to but it’s not too bad, it’s also extremely powerful once you learn more about it.
No ned to pirate. Just send your ebooks through Calibre to remove DRM and put them on your privacy friendly* reader. Maybe don't buy them all from Amazon in the future.
* may need some work. PocketBook doesn't track you, Kobo is pretty good too, Onyx must be debloated to not send telemetry (like any Android device), Amazon devices are Android too?
Can you point me to a good guide to set up calibre to remove drm?
This is the method I use for my Kindle (and some Google Books) purchases.