That was a great feeling--taking something locked in, programmed, something that used intentionally deceptive description and design, and finding a way to make it your own. To, basically, break the deceptive design and make the device better by "breaking" it.

When I rooted my first Android phone I felt that way. It's a shame how much of the computing power in phones is used for nothing but harvesting our data and profiting from our use of the computer.

There's so much more we need to break now.

This is why I bought a 12 year old Sony ereader, the only thing I really miss is a back(front?)light

In gormany you can buy Tolino ereaders. Similar price to amazon, does not need an account. If you want to move stuff on there, you can just connect it to your computer, where it shows up as a usp storage device. If you want to use their cloud (no subscription, you get 30GB for your own stuff + all books bought from a number of varios book stores are hostet for free), you obviously need an account, but still upload all your stuff like totally your legally aquired collection of 20000 ebooks. At some point there was the possibility to update it via your computer, so you can use this device completely offline

I got a kobo sage, and it does require an account, but it didn't force me to install a shitty app.

Luckily, its very moddable (just drag and drop a .zip file), so I'm still keeping it.