The title is a little confusing. It's not the ebooks but the ebook readers - especially Kindle - that are able to gather and send data. Makes me wonder what the best hardware and software for private ebook reading is.
I did a quick search for "best ebook reader for privacy" and got the usual review sites, but "privacy" isn't mentioned in any of their reviews.
So what are the options? There's an add-on for Firefox called Epubreader ... I'll have to keep looking into it. Definitely getting off the kindle/amazon train though.
An old Pocketbook would be (and still is) my hardware of choice. They run some kind of Linux, support apps (which need to be sideloaded), .mobi, .epub, mangas and .pdf (this one is a bit choppy but it's a decade old device). The only available connectivity is wifi which I keep off because browsing is shit on an ereader.
“Correction: An earlier version of this op-ed claimed the publisher Elsevier was tracking and selling data to third parties, a claim Elsevier rejects. Such claims have since been removed from the article.”
That’s a pretty big mistake for the article authors to make, unless it wasn’t.