> I haven't seen anything that makes the kindle software actually better -- it might not crash, but it still sucks for anyone who really reads books.
as someone who reads a lot, I disagree with you.
> And, of course, there's no way I'm going let Amazon know what I read and on which page I pause.
you don't have to. Just don't buy any books from Amazon, and turn off the syncing of where you are in the book.
90% of the books that I have are not purchased from Amazon (and are DRM free, before you trot that out). In my case, Amazon knows that I have most of them because I use the 'e-mail to device' option, which runs them through the Amazon servers, but you could just load them via USB.