I had a setup similar to this for a year or two that ended with an hdd destroying itself one night. Probably because of the drive and not the usb enclosure I was using. Until then it worked fine, it’s definitely a viable route.

If you can swing a desktop pc case it’ll probably end up easier and cheaper and have some headroom for upgrades, that’s the route I went down after trying an escalating series of mini-pcs and running into their limits one too many times.

I have a few kindles, have upgraded over the years and have been able to use them all in the same manner:

With a new device I connect it to the internet and update the firmware to the latest version (the factory installed version has had a lot of missing functionality in my experience). Then I block it from my network, delete the AP entry and put it permanently into airplane mode.

When purchasing an ebook from Amazon you can download it for usb transfer and I organize it on my laptop with Calibre.

Calibre can also strip drm, but if you’re transferring it to the device you downloaded it for it isn’t necessary.

Amazon may at some point in the future change all of this, but the content I have already downloaded can not be revoked and is usable outside the Amazon ecosystem if the drm is removed.

That narrow band of survivalists who are not unnaturally interested in fire

I have a pro that I use with a ps5 controller, sunshine and moonlight, but I connect the controller directly to my pc instead of going through the shield. Using the shield results in a different “feel” to the games and android insists on stealing the ps button input for android menu nonsense without any way (that I could find) to disable that and pass it through to the pc.

There’s lots of options for extending Bluetooth and usb to computers further away if yours isn’t close enough. I wouldn’t recommend this setup if you needed to connect the controller through the shield. I am sensitive to that sort of thing, but I think most people would find it pretty bad, especially if they have any experience using it with a console.

The rest works brilliantly (when connected with wired networking), I rarely use my pc directly for games anymore.