I buy paperbacks, chop and scan them [1] then use a reMarkable tablet + RCU [2] to do the reading.
Digitizing paper books and writing on them with digital ink is 100% the best way to have marginalia. I've tried special dotcode pens, portable scanners...writing digitally with a stylus is the best. Yes, it destroys the paper book, but it more than makes up for it with the freedom, flexibility, and durability of the digital copy.
Your language is far too kind for the invasion of privacy and our human expectations of what ought to be permissible. It's not just about being "recorded" in public. It's about having all public excursions recorded, cataloged, and analyzed. What this panopticon of private surveillance is, is way more similar to "stalking" than "recording".
That power, today, is expressed through technology, and these overlords hold their control via proprietary software and anticompetitive business practices.
To seize power back, you need to relinquish their shackles by using technology that is designed with user freedom in mind, not "lock-in", and support businesses constituted of that ethos.
reMarkable Connection Utility (RCU) is a desktop client for managing the device offline, licensed AGPLv3 but sold for $12. Be aware, it is my software.
What an absolute failure of their management. I've been using and developing for reMarkable since 2018 and the writing was on the wall back in 2021 when they moved their focus from making a useful, durable product (the RM1) to flashy marketing and poorly designed hardware. The company I originally liked died when their original CTO, Martin Sandsmark, left.
They had so many opportunities for growth. They could have written more useful software. They double-downed on a bad file format, their program data should be natively represented in PDF objects, not JSON+binary with extra rendering required. They didn't engage with the developer community hardly at all, who literally does free work/evangelism for the brand, and knows their product better than their own employees. They can, and still should, make their software as open-source as possible, and take the best community improvements back into their mainline. They need to fire their "UX" people and put someone in charge who knows what good software should be (hint: it's not putting commonly-used buttons behind another button, just to make way for your brand's logo at the top of the screen).
I don't even want to know what their cloud spend is, but they are absolutely getting ripped off there. They need to get on owned infrastructure, and second they need to move off all of it as quickly as possible and give people the means to host data on their own network storage. It should not cost users over $40/year to host <8 GB of files. They need to give users a native option for self-hosted cloud sync and stop trying to lock customers in to their crappy SaaS-ware.
IMO if the company goes under, it will be a boon for RCU, rmfakecloud, and reManager, but ultimately after enough people pull away (and it's already started, no one can afford luxury goods, 50% of consumer spending is by 10% of the population), none of it will matter much in two years.
Because the World Economic Forum, where our political and corporate leaders meet and groom each other, point-blank advertised "you will own nothing and be happy."