Same with any prepay SIM I'm aware of, to activate it you need a phone because why would anyone ever use a SIM with anything that isn't a phone, like an e-book

Same with any prepay SIM I'm aware of, to activate it you need a phone because why would anyone ever use a SIM with anything that isn't a phone, like an e-book reader for your elderly mother to read her romance novels on? And before anyone asks, the reader takes a full-size SIM, the phones take nano-SIMs, and you can't restore it back to a full-size SIM with a shim because the reader won't allow it to be inserted, it just gets mangled as you push it into the slot.