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It's pretty trivial to load up an epub file (or a few other formats, IIRC) onto the device. It exposes itself as USB storage, so you just mount and copy your files over. There aren't as many fancy features like position syncing, but it's definitely a great piece of hardware even if you don't want to use Amazon services.

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Even better is you can send PDF's/EPUB's etc to a special amazon email address and it converts them for you and syncs them over wireless.

And if you jailbreak your kindle you get SSH. I have my kindle mounted via sftp so I don't even have to send anything to amazon just to have it sent back to my device.

I don't know if this is still true, but I read a number of years ago that the Kindle hardware was sold at under cost and subsidized by the "sales" of DRMed content. I've got an early-gen Kindle with no content actually purchased from Amazon on it; it's a really nice arrangement.

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