I’ve had a Kindle for 14 years now and just retired my first one, after upgrading to the 2022 version.
As for the giving money to Amazon, I payed 80€ back then and my first Kindle survived 14 years of regular reading, so I can live with that. The ebooks I read I either borrow from local library or ‘find’ online, so no money to Amazon there. You can easily download any book to it, in this new version it’s as simple as adding it to your Kindle app on the phone. So if this is your main concern, you don’t ever have to buy an ebook from Amazon :)
And having a Kindle actually made me buy more books than I did before, because it opened me to so much new literature that wasn’t available in my country (small European place).
I’ve had a Kindle for 14 years now and just retired my first one, after upgrading to the 2022 version.
As for the giving money to Amazon, I payed 80€ back then and my first Kindle survived 14 years of regular reading, so I can live with that. The ebooks I read I either borrow from local library or ‘find’ online, so no money to Amazon there. You can easily download any book to it, in this new version it’s as simple as adding it to your Kindle app on the phone. So if this is your main concern, you don’t ever have to buy an ebook from Amazon :)
And having a Kindle actually made me buy more books than I did before, because it opened me to so much new literature that wasn’t available in my country (small European place).