I had an old kindle that I never connected to the net or with an amazon account. I loaded books by USB.
Damn near impossible to find DRM free books to purchase though.
It is still possible to remove DRM and export to PDF or epub. Not point-and-click easy, though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...
> Damn near impossible to find DRM free books to purchase
My method has always been to buy physical books (which is also better to support the author, because they get a bigger % of the price you pay.
And then, there are other creative ways to download the ebook... (without buying from Amazon, or other monopolists.)