You can also jailbreak most kindles. I picked up my first one a couple of weeks ago here in the UK and intentionally bought it from Argos (high street shop) rather than Amazon so that I'd stand more of a chance of the installed firmware being slighly older as the jailbreak currently available was patched in the latest version (apparently it happens a lot, someone just finds a new way around it).
Took about 20 minutes to have it jailbroken and KOReader installed, I can now wirelessly copy over books from Calibre on my Mac to the kindle and don't have to touch amazons storefront at all.
If you're going that route then perhaps pocketbook or kobo would be a better option.
For the UK the Kindle's still the cheapest option at the moment.
Mine was £94 here: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/4079659
Searching around for the pocketbook it's not sold in the UK but on their German store the cheapest model looks to be the 'Basic Lux 4 Ink Black' for €109 so seems the most price comparable.
The Kobo is more expensive though, the cheapest model is the Clara black & white edition and costs £129.99, at which point you may as well get a Kindle Paperwhite kids* as those are only £10 more.
*All kindle kids editions are the same as the non-kid versions, but come with a case, charger and extended warranty, there are no hardware or firmware differences.
The article links to https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/pocketbook-basic-lux-4-ink-b... for pocketbooks in the UK
ah completely missed that, thats a pretty decent price then! I wonder if they're just getting rid of stock as Pocketbook did pull out of the UK market a while back.
Should really do this on my and my wife's Kindles, we just have them in airplane mode all the time, using Calibre + USB to copy books over.