I've decided with all my commercial e-readers that the USB+calibre is my only option as I do not wish to share my reading habits with the zillionaire overlord.

There might be new and fancy UI or something, but I spend 99% of the time only flipping pages so the outdated UX is nothing compared to the privacy I get.

Ancient Basic Kindle works still nicely and so does 1st gen Paperwhite + the few Kobo's we have in the family.

So it still works as a generic ereader via Calibre? That seems like a pretty fine outcome. I don't think Amazon (or any company) should be on the hook supporting a device for 16 years. I can't think of any company which does. Dropping support for old devices frees up eng resources. If you've ever worked in a shop needing to support legacy devices, it becomes a huge burden to keep up support (especially as the supporting software/hardware starts to degrade, like 3P updates) for what becomes an increasingly small number of users. Of course, if the number of users remains significant, support should be maintained.

I have been hoping for an open e-reader to be built, and it appears someone is building one: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/14/open-book-touch-makes-crowd-... (Joey Castillo’s Open Book project, no affiliation, I just like open/sovereign tech stacks)

> But what you won’t get is locked down with DRM — the Open Book Touch uses standard EPUB and TXT files loaded from a micro SD card, and thanks to the WiFi-enabled ESP32 at its heart, it offers up a web interface that lets you manage your collection over the network.

Kobo works great in my experience though for those looking for a turnkey open-ish commercial solution.