Like always, Black Mirror has an episode on this.

Isn't Black Mirror a manual at this point?

After AI became a thing, Amazon decided you needed to pay a subscribtion to use Alexa with an LLM instead of the basic keyword recognition model

Not this one. I've been a Prime member for many years out of convenience (and because I live in the rurals and need to ship a lot of things to the house). Amazon completely fucked it up for themselves with regard to my subscription this past year or two, I'm done.

• Removed the ability to download and sideload Kindle books
• Ads in Prime Video
• Followed by even more ads in Prime Video
• Now this, and I don't even own an Alexa device

I'm done. Subscription is cancelled (has been for some time now, but unfortunately it was reupped annual). I've found alternative sources for several things I need to buy monthly/regularly that I previously would purchase on Amazon. Video was already trashed, but I barely used it. I've jailbroken my Kindles, converted all my books to EPUB, and installed KOReader on them. Wasn't a hard transition since I've had a Boox device as my main reader for some years now anyway. I've started buying my books from Kobo and other sources.

Looking into other services for online purchases and shipping. It'll be less convenient, and I'll still buy from Amazon in the event I absolutely have to, but I'd like to minimize that now.

Do you have a shotgun? Makes a respectable flying target.

Now I'm going to refuse to purchase one even harder!

I got a shotgun, and here's the plot,

Takin' Minis out with a flurry of buck shot,

Boom, boom, boom! Yeah, I was gunnin',

And then you look, all you see is Googles runnin',

And fallin' and yellin' and pushin' and screamin',

And cussin', I stepped back and I kept bustin'

Never had issues sideloading epubs with Calibre on my PW.

No, Amazon took away the "Download and transfer via USB" option when downloading your books. Making it more difficult to strip DRM, but also to conveniently add it to multiple devices. I prefer to keep my eReaders offline and manage them with Calibre.

Regarding sideloading EPUBs with Calibre, it's not really doing that. Under normal circumstances Kindle can't read EPUB format at all, so Calibre will convert it to a native format, either MOBI or AZW3 generally. But with a jailbroken Kindle and KOReader, you can actually read EPUBs natively. I've actually converted my entire collection to EPUB and deleted the AZW3 and KFX files.

Oh my bad.

Any reason why those formats are worse than epub?